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

Ireland Bus!!

[justinmc]

I grew up in Schull, West Cork - don't talk to me about the Bus schedule from there.
Two or three buses a day out of the place.
One on a Sunday! The day I got a car was one of the happiest in my life - the sad thing is I prefer to use public transport, but it just isn't an option in some parts of Ireland!

Jay

Really need more info but, here goes:

[stoborrobots]

Ideally, you would say what kind of connectivity is available in the area you are working on. For example

• Is there cell-phone coverage throughout the area? Is it GSM or CDMA? (If it's GSM, you could acquire receive-only SIMs from a provider, and send updates from the bus via SMS).
• Is there cabling in the area (telephone/electricity) which is easy to tap into? (Could you make a deal with the telco to provide a line to the bus stop?)
• Are bus stops located near other facilities which could jointly use services (eg pubs/service stations which could share an internet link with the bus stop)?
• Are there any locations from which a radio antenna could transmit to the entire route (or a significant portion thereof)? (Could you set up a transceiver on a hill, receivers in the bus stops, and a transmitter on the bus?)
• Is the area geographically small enough? How many roads are involved? How far do the roads deviate from one another? (Could you run transmitters along one road which could be received from a large number of other roads?)

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head. HTH. YMMV. HAND.

Wi-Fi?

[peterdaly]

My not knowing the area is an understatement, but here's an idea.

Wi-Fi at (or around) each stop. Have a device, old laptop etc on the bus that sends out a "here I am" type ping through Wi-Fi and the internet which is received by a central server which can identify the access point of origin (by IP address maybe?). As the bus drives around, a "location" will be sent at each stop to the central server, which then can be used to calculate and transmit an ETA to the other stops.

As a bonus, you may be able to provide "open" Wi-Fi at the stops for the customers, although your market may not be tech savy enough to take advantage of the service.

No reason you could not have other "hotspots" along the route if you need additional tracking points, as long as the bus is in range long enough to "handshake" and send the signal.

Co-Lo hotspots with local businesses or residents.

Do I really know what I am talking about here? No, but it may work.

-Pete

A suggestion: Have bus drivers use cell phones.

[Futurepower(R)]

A suggestion:

Maybe the bus drivers all have cell phones, already. They could program a speed dial button for a voicemail answering system. When they arrive at a stop, or a landmark, they could press a speed dial button and say, Bus 6 arriving at stop 17, [town name], [time].

If bus drivers don't have cell phones that work in the area, they would have to call from pay phones along the route. This would be convenient if they were stopped for a few minutes. It is possible to buy inexpensive devices which play back a series of tones, so that the drivers would not have to enter the digits by hand.

Bus riders would call the voicemail number, and hear the recorded messages. The speed dial buttons would not only call the voicemail number, but also pick a voicemail box, and erase the previous message. So, bus riders would choose the voicemail box corresponding to their area.

The disadvantage of this is that some people might have to pay a toll charge to call the voicemail system. The advantage is that the service might be close to self-financing.

Some answering service systems have almost unlimited mailboxes, so other messages of interest to the community could be programmed, also. For example, a sign at the town hall could say, "If you want to know the location and date of the next [town name] town meeting, choose voicemail box 230." Or, a sign could say "Anyone wanting to know how Mrs. O'Leary of [town name] is doing in the hospital, call voicemail box 1472, and enter access code 241."

People say good things about the free Asterisk telephone system software. Here's a quote from the web site: "Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory..." You would need only an old computer, since Linux and voice don't require much CPU speed.

One computer could handle a very wide area, and many bus routes, I think, because each message is very short.

Messages could be more detailed than just time and place. The bus driver could say, "Stopping for unscheduled maintenance at [town name]. Running late about one hour."

With considerable programming, people could leave their number to be called when a bus arrives at a particular town just previous to theirs.

Re:EU initiative?

[citog]

-1 Langer ? :)

The poster does say that this is demand-driven public transport i.e. minibuses and not Bus Eireann, so I doubt their IT group would be much help. I also think that this is going to be very limited rural coverage hence the issue with companies not quoting. From memory these minibus (and such like) services are organised very much on an ad-hoc basis which isn't suited to most scheduling solutions available (you've seen how accurate the DART times are?)

I agree with the yobb factor which isn't limited to you Corkies either. I would tend to agree with the early poster who suggested some form of sms based solution. How difficult is it for the driver to sms a bus-stop number (doesn't even have to be every stop, you could extrapolate as discussed above). Use the timestamp on the message. Then let people sms the stop number in and get a predicted arrival time...