Obtaining Real Time Transit Info?

remolacha asks: "I am working on an EU initiative to create small-scale demand-driven public transit (minibuses + GIS + logic + SMS gateway for people to request transit) in rural Ireland. Our plan is to connect several small towns that have no public transit to a bus stop served by a national carrier, so as to enable residents of these towns to reach the two neighboring cities (20 miles in each direction, which have jobs, universities, etc). The thing is, no one wants to be dropped at a bus stop without knowing when the next bus is coming (buses don't come that often here, and schedules aren't reliable.) We'd like to provide real-time information on when the next bus is coming, as you see in some large cities. the problem is our project is so small, none of the companies that make these systems will even give us a quote. so my question for Slashdot is this: is there a homebrew or inexpensive way to set up a display at a bus stop that will tell users when the next bus is coming from a city 20 miles away? There are hills involved, so line of sight isn't an option."

Comments

Re:Wi-Fi?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello?!?

The last line of the article said:

There are hills involved, so line of sight isn't an option.

Good luck in getting quality data.

If all you need are simple pings, try something like HAM frequencies. You don't need the throughput, and line-of-sight is not an issue.