I would love to see this come to more cities. I live in a major north American city where public transportation is run by the local government. They have an official transportation app, but it's a buggy mess that's just a wrapper for the phone browser. It features "real time" (their words) route tracking, but as I quickly found out, the busses that move along the map aren't actually representative of the real busses and their locations (e.g. GPS tracking). Instead, their location and arrival estimates are based entirely on where they should be at that time under ideal conditions, making them entirely useless at rush hour and in inclimate weather conditions (which is precisely when people rely on them the most).
As a result, catching the bus is a complete guessing game every day. There are three possible outcomes:
1) The bus arrives 5-10 minutes early and doesn't wait around, so you have to get to your stop at least 15 minutes early.
2) The bus is late (the typical scenario), so you spend 15-60+ minutes convincing yourself you aren't crazy and the bus didn't pass before your eyes while wondering how long you can continue standing outside before getting frostbite.
3) You spend 15-30 minutes standing around in scenario (2) above before getting an "alert" from the app that your route has been cancelled. These late alerts ensure that even if you manage to find a different route to take you to your destination, you'll have to repeat the guessing game above and you'll definitely be late.
Uber and Lyft have numerous problems still, but as far as I'm concerned their disruption of the transportation industry has been long overdue. My local government refuses to expose the transportation API, so even if there was a motivated individual who wanted to make a better app they wouldn't have access to the information they needed. I can't wait for more competition in this space.
Is Transit (https://transitapp.com/) available where you live? If there's no official API for realtime updates, it also allows you to share your GPS data to the rest of the app users for crowdsourcing this info. Overall it works pretty well for me.
Oh Transit fakes data where they don't have real-time info too. They just put a slick interface on it. After waiting in the cold for a once an hour bus that they were lying about I finally uninstalled the app. The incessant prompts to pay for an Uber didn't help matters either.
Not to defend the app in question, but certain public transport organisations publish incorrect data.
One example of this is the RATP (Paris public transport) - they refuse to publish live feeds: the data they publish is a basically their "best effort" static timetable.
The data presented by the Transit app matched neither the published timetables nor reality. If memory serves it was marked as real-time data. My assumption is that Transit was using their bullshit "crowd sourced" algorithm.
Plenty of of agencies publish bogus data (e.g.: Muni has predictions for outbound train service even when a train will be taken out of service at the end of the line, as a result only the second to last prediction for the night is valid). This was Transit being useless.
I'm a bit curious which city you live in, because the majority major cities(at least in the US) publish both GTFS and GTFS real time. This is how Google(and other applications) gather the data. Does Google Maps provide real time data for transit? If not, you may want to get in touch with your cities transit service and inquire why not. I was part of a team that did GTFS(not real time) for a small area, and it was not incredibly expensive. Most of the data the transit service already has and its usually just a matter of doing some transformations on the data into the new format.
I would rather not reveal my city for privacy reasons, but Google Maps also only shows the fixed "schedule" and no real time estimates.
I was not aware about GTFS, but I'll read about it and try and contact the city council maybe. My city isn't small or poor so the problem definitely isn't one caused by lack of resources, but maybe it's just something they haven't considered before. In any case, thank you for your insight.
GPS on buses seems like a no brainer compared to other investments if you want to make public transit more popular. Being able to walk to the bus stop and knowing you’ll wait 1-2 minutes is great compared to running to the bus stop and waiting 15 minutes.
My local authority has had a free public API for a long time and also contacts people following up on how API use is going, arranging meetups for people wanting to code things with the API and so on.
That's too bad. Los Angeles Metro has had "Nextrip", GPS based arrival estimates, on Rapid bus lines for 10+ years, and on Local bus lines for less than that. The service is accurate and absolutely fantastic. I only wish that the UX for casual riders who want Nextrip info on their phones was better.
I don't know why, but this bad practice seems to be in place in so many places. Live tracking seems to be almost uniformly code for Timetable tracking in public transit. In the UK I can stand and watch the live information for the train departing from Waterloo - it'll say the train is on-time for leaving at 5:30. I can go into their own app, identify the physical train that is going to terminate at waterloo and become my train and find out that it left the last station 20 minutes late. Clearly the system is driven by timetables which are then modified by manual entries rather than some actual underlying representation of the trains (which clearly must exist for them to be able to manage their fleet of trains).
? UK Network Rail APIs are the probably the best I've seen. There is ~10,000 real time monitoring sensors on the network. Check out realtimetrains.co.uk for example, which is driven by the STOMP feed from NR (which sends thousands of requests per second on real time location and status of each and every train in the UK).
Regarding your point on outbound trains, often if a train is running late inbound they will have another one take over the duties, so trying to identify it isn't a perfect system for predicting.
The background data may be great, but I regularly experience standing at a station telling me the train is on time when it is already late (after the point the train should have left).
As a counterexample the company running public transport where I’m from actually released this just a few days ago. So it doesn’t seem to be an impossible task.
As a result, catching the bus is a complete guessing game every day. There are three possible outcomes:
1) The bus arrives 5-10 minutes early and doesn't wait around, so you have to get to your stop at least 15 minutes early.
2) The bus is late (the typical scenario), so you spend 15-60+ minutes convincing yourself you aren't crazy and the bus didn't pass before your eyes while wondering how long you can continue standing outside before getting frostbite.
3) You spend 15-30 minutes standing around in scenario (2) above before getting an "alert" from the app that your route has been cancelled. These late alerts ensure that even if you manage to find a different route to take you to your destination, you'll have to repeat the guessing game above and you'll definitely be late.
Uber and Lyft have numerous problems still, but as far as I'm concerned their disruption of the transportation industry has been long overdue. My local government refuses to expose the transportation API, so even if there was a motivated individual who wanted to make a better app they wouldn't have access to the information they needed. I can't wait for more competition in this space.