More news from The Future - Buses and Google Mashups

[andrewducker]

Our lovely local bus company has slowly been entering the 21st century by rolling out a bus tracking service. This has become increasingly common around the rest of the country - basically it means that each stop has a sign up telling you when the next few buses will arrive at it.

The problem is that they've only got the signs up on a couple of main thoroughfares through the city - Leith Walk/North Bridge (going North South) and Princes Street out to Dalry (going East West) - and even then only in the more central parts.

However, and this is the cool part, the information is actually available for the entire city - and as of today you can get it over either the web or on your phone. Each bus stop has a number on it, so you can simply pop to the WAP site, enter the number, and be told when the next set of buses is going to arrive.

And not just handy for knowing how long to stand about at the bus stop (or whether to get on the bus that's arriving now or wait two minutes for a better one) - two bus routes converge just past my flat, and I never know which stop to go to. Now I'll know which one is worth heading for - or indeed, whether I've got time to check livejournal one more time before heading out :->

The site's at www.mybustracker.co.uk if you want to take a look. And it actually has a nice bit of functionality behind it. It uses a Google Maps mashup to allow you to find your local bus stop - where every stop in the city is a red dot, and you can click on it to see its unique number and a link to its times. It's actually quite impressive.

Comments

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Is that real time tracking? Or just a fancy route book?

[andrewducker]

Real time. The buses all have GPS.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's awesome. I wish we had that here.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Almost all of the buses. You will see *'s next to the estimated ones, just as with the real bus trackers.

After a while, the site is pretty disappointing. No realtime gps data, no journey time predictions, no navigation between bustops, or even a text list of bus stops on a route. Instead, a slow loading google map is provided.

The website as it stands is inaccessible, slow, buggy, badly designed and trying to emulate a tiny lcd on a pole in an edinburgh street, instead of being, say a web app.

The lcd display is for public information boards, where you want to show as much as possible without being too specific. Thus, numbers, terminals and estimated wait.

Meanwhile, if I'm having to tell it where I am, why can't I tell it where I want to go, and see when it should arrive and when it actually has been arriving ?

Of which, why doesn't it allow me to pick a destination and autopopulate the display with possible journeys (including connections), instead of manually collating the relevant bus code numbers into a form.

And just to annoy you, you can't scroll using the scroll bar. That would be too convienient.

They aren't just locked into looking and acting like a bus tracker on a website (this is bad), but that wait times is the only information you want from a bus tracker (also bad).

It's a clunky, awkward, hard to use and badly presented way of finding how long you have to wait, but It's better than waiting outside in the cold.

Hopefully in time someone will scrape it and make a useful website :)

[nuttyxander.livejournal.com]

Wot tef said.

I saw this on bbc news so I thought I'd see how easy the WAP system was to set up to use whenever I'm up in Edinburgh and want to get the bus out to my parents. Seeing as it takes something like 5 pages to find the departures from a stop.

Needs to be more like the railway live departure boards.

Also, it only covers Lothian buses. Route franchising really is a must for any capital city and should be brought in ASAP.

I hope the iBus rollout down here doesn't work similarly. Thus far the talking buses "this is a 3-9-1 to... Richmond" are kinda handy when you're in unknown (to you) London and otherwise kinda alright.