Boston's MBTA seems to be leading the way with this kind of information, and with making it open to developers. http://mbta.com/rider_tools/apps/ lists dozens of web sites and mobile apps which use data about the MBTA's buses and trains.
The MBTA's bus data (via http://www.nextbus.com, the giant in this industry) tends to be pretty good, though sometimes buses disappear from listings and reappear, and sometimes the predictions aren't very accurate, but they're definitely useful. Subway train data is only fed into the system once a train leaves the end of the line, so there tends not to be data for inbound trains for the first several stops. Commuter rail data is still different, because trains are so much less frequent and people tend to aim to be on a particular train which they know based on its scheduled time.
Other transit agencies are much more closed about their data. For instance, DC's WMATA requires you to sign up for an API key and access all data using their web services, even though their bus data comes from NextBus so you'd think they could let you hit NextBus's web services for their data.
There's also the brand-new GTFS-realtime spec from Google, which is a Protocol Buffer format for getting vehicle positions and so on very efficiently. The idea is that you'd be able to get the current locations of all the vehicles in a large system, like the MBTA, in a single request.
(Shameless plug: one of the MBTA apps listed in the app catalog is my web site http://www.mbtainfo.com)
The DART in Dallas allows you to look up the real-time location of the next bus inbound to your station.
Combine that with a public transportation system that actually goes somewhere useful in a reasonable amount of time at useful times, and you might have something interesting.
Just about every bus/train will already have a GPS device on it (to help dispatchers and for safety), it's just a matter of convincing the transit authority to release that data into the public.
Minneapolis's MetroTransit, for example, has the ability to do realtime tracking but chose to go with a "n minutes until next bus" system rather than show moving dots on a map.
Nextbus.com already does this with several public transportation systems, including Boston and San Francisco. I'm actually in the process of putting together a service to alert riders when the bus is about to arrive, based on that data. It's still in beta, it only supports Boston, it's ugly as all hell and probably broken in places, but if anyone wants to look around, it's live here:
Well, if our local transit company has a GPS module in every its vehicle on a route and can watch all of them nearly real-time ("nearly" is something like updates every 30 seconds), and we are in Eastern Europe, then any transit authority can. There is no need to "crowdsource" it.
On the other hand, they aren't very good in communicating the information they have. The best thing we have is this: http://idsjmk.jrbrno.cz/ and Google Maps.
There are another problems that are not mentioned at all in the article. Service irregularities, either planned or not. There are frequent tram track repairs, street closures… So, what changes are there on my route, if any? Was the stop that I'm planning to get on moved behind the corner? Where exactly can I get on? And exactly means exactly, cellphone GPS can't tell you decisively if you are at the right side of the road, for example. And that is a crucial difference if you are planning to get on a bus.
And what if I'm waiting for a tram, and there was an accident somewhere and all the trams are delayed. What now? Was a reserve bus dispatched to replace it? When will it arrive? And where, if it's a segregated tramway and the bus can't use the stop?
Thanks for the link to this. Very cool! While the OP describes a crowd-sourced solution, this seems to be a setup where 1 GPS is attached per vehicle.
On seeing this, I have a reaction that I'd like to share. Someone at this University had vision. They seem to have less than 20 buses in their fleet. However, we're still talking about a serious investment (It isn't just the phones, it is also data plans. They might be using their campus wifi network which would significantly lower their costs).
I've tried doing this in other places some time ago. However, it was impossible to get anyone to invest in such a thing. What do you do when you are in this situation? I've done mock-ups, buying initial hardware with my own $$, but still. I guess in our society, pretty much everything comes down to economic value. On one hand, it makes sense. On the other, it makes me sad. </rant>
They offer open access to this information through an API (see toronto.ca/open). I built something to watch the streetcars on a map using that API: http://totransit.ca/
My coworker and I were talking about letting people "check in" to specific streetcars, and tag variables such as "how full is the streetcar?", but I can't see many (any?) people actually doing that.
I thought about this mobile solution as well, as a way to get at data that in my (not humble anymore. Geez, just open up) opinion should be given away by the companies running the service. I like the UK datasets.
I'm coming from Germany. Although everyone complains about public transportation (and the Deutsche Bahn especially) it generally works. If you're at a bus stop, you generally get a nice timetable with all stations and arrival times for each of them.
Now I'm in Tel Aviv: If I'm lucky I've got a plan that shows me the route and ~maybe~ when the bus leaves the first stop. If I'm far away, this is useless..
I can't honestly see passengers paying extra for this. I see the transit company/department as the customer. In reality they already gps track all their fleets in the US, its just a matter of exposing the data in a digestible format.
If they opened up APIs, some enterprising individual could build apps on top of it, and sell the apps or run ads across.
Sidenote, what about the security issues related to sharing this data? Are there any?
> I can't honestly see passengers paying extra for this.
People whose jobs are relatively inflexible when it comes to arrival times would pay. My girlfriend basically has to guess and hope that the train runs on time in order to make it to work - it would be super nice to pull up a site when we wake up and see the current locations of the trains, and an estimated arrival time based on actual data, rather than the MTA's dreams and wishes.
It would also be great to know whether a train has recently left the station at night - should I wait 2 minutes for the next train, or should I just start biking and arrive at my destination before the train even shows?
The timing isn't perfect, but it gives you good sense of "Is there a bus coming soon." I've been thinking about coding up my own UI as theirs is pretty mediocre of what I want it to do.
I use it to check bus times on my way to and from work. There are two different buslines I can wait for, and no easy way to check which one will be coming first - I have to load each page and compare. Also, loading the site on my android phone almost always results in an error the first time - forcing me to load the page again. I haven't taken the time to debug this yet, but it's always annoying when I'm trying to check the bus times on the go.
Try using http://metrotransit.org/map/ to solve your first problem (click a stop and it will show NexTrip for all the bus routes that stop there). That doesn't solve your second problem though: I have the same problems (and my wife does on her iPhone). I have an Android app started ... maybe I should finish it. Is it worth $0.99 to you? :)
The two routes don't come to the same stop. I'm looking for an easy answer to "Should I wait on Hennepin or Nicollet?" without waiting for multiple pages to load on my phone.
I'd definitely pay $1 if I thought the app would address those two problems. Someone has on open source site for just the NexTrip API, but I haven't had success with it yet:
http://metrotransitapi.appspot.com/
After reading the problems, I expected we were looking for dynamically generated transit maps (excluding all lines/stops that aren't directly between you and your destination), coupled with a statistical curve of actual arrival times at each stop.
GPS is useful, but when planning a route in advance, I'd prefer to know the above.
Has API access and everything. I look forward to it being deployed further, though I suppose it won't make it to the subways owing to them being underground.
There are a lot of stations (numbered lines only, I think) that have "time to next subway" signs which I've found to be pretty accurate. I'm not sure if there is an API for subway info, but they run so regularly (~5 mins or less during the day and 30 mins at late night) that it's generally not that important to get that info. I'm not going to take a taxi because the subway is 15 mins away.
The MBTA's bus data (via http://www.nextbus.com, the giant in this industry) tends to be pretty good, though sometimes buses disappear from listings and reappear, and sometimes the predictions aren't very accurate, but they're definitely useful. Subway train data is only fed into the system once a train leaves the end of the line, so there tends not to be data for inbound trains for the first several stops. Commuter rail data is still different, because trains are so much less frequent and people tend to aim to be on a particular train which they know based on its scheduled time.
Other transit agencies are much more closed about their data. For instance, DC's WMATA requires you to sign up for an API key and access all data using their web services, even though their bus data comes from NextBus so you'd think they could let you hit NextBus's web services for their data.
There's also the brand-new GTFS-realtime spec from Google, which is a Protocol Buffer format for getting vehicle positions and so on very efficiently. The idea is that you'd be able to get the current locations of all the vehicles in a large system, like the MBTA, in a single request.
(Shameless plug: one of the MBTA apps listed in the app catalog is my web site http://www.mbtainfo.com)