WINNIPEG – Cities across Canada are trying to boost public transit use by tackling one of the biggest frustrations for riders, the interminable wait at a bus stop in pouring rain or bitter cold wondering when the heck that bus will come.
Municipal transit services are turning to text-messaging systems, apps for mobile devices and even alerts for your desktop to make riding a bus, train or subway more predictable and user-friendly.
Winnipeg is on the leading edge, using global positioning software on all its buses to provide real-time information across multiple platforms. With a quick click on a computer or mobile device, you can see when your bus will arrive – and not the scheduled time, but an up-to-the-minute estimate based on its current position and traffic volumes.
“We’ve recognized from the onset that providing people with accurate and timely information enables them to take full advantage of the transit system,” said David Wardrop, director of Winnipeg Transit.
Winnipeg has spent more than $4 million on its information system, which includes a program called BusGadget. Designed for a home or office computer, the program lets users monitor one or more bus stops to see when upcoming buses are due. Users can also set up customized alerts.
Let’s say you want to catch the 59 down Main Street at 5 p.m. to get home from work, and the stop is a five-minute walk from your office. You can set BusGadget to remind you, via a pop-up bubble, 10 or 15 minutes ahead of time. The bubble will also tell you whether the bus is running late and provide a new expected arrival time.
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Winnipeg has a mobile version of the program, called BusGuide, which lets you monitor all the buses coming to your stop. It’s updated every 30 seconds with the latest real-time estimates and works on the browser of any mobile device. If your preferred bus is late, you can see if another one is coming soon or run an errand until the next bus arrives.
The aim is to help riders avoid long waits on the streets of a city where winter temperatures can dip below -40. The cold weather is one reason why car culture is still dominant in Winnipeg, although that may be slowly changing.
Ridership has been growing by 2.5 to three per cent each year recently, while the city’s population has grown by about 1.5 per cent annually, Wardrop said.
Toronto’s transit authority has also moved to provide real-time arrival information through GPS locators on its buses. The system went on-line last month through a third-party website. The info is also available via text-messaging. Users can send a text that includes their bus stop number and get a message back that outlines the arrival times of upcoming buses.
The Toronto Transit Commission doesn’t have the type of desktop software that Winnipeg does to remind users of upcoming buses, but it is allowing software developers to access its data and come up with their own programs.
Other cities, such as Edmonton and Montreal, have plans to add GPS technology. Edmonton officials started offering scheduled bus times via text messages earlier this year and were surprised by the strong response.
“We projected about 10,000 text messages in January, and we rolled out January 4th . . . and we actually ended up getting over 118,000 messages sent in January,” said Nathan Walters, the supervisor in charge of the project at Edmonton Transit System.
“It was a big wake-up call for us in terms of realizing that the demand is clearly there for mobile information.”
Edmonton also has an open-data policy for developers, and showcases some third-party apps on its website. Programs for Android devices, iPhones and others are featured.
Transit services are also adopting new technology to make it easier for riders to pay their fare. Instead of fishing for exact change or tickets, riders in Regina and some other cities are able to use reloadable smart cards.
Eventually, a wave of a smartphone could be all that is needed to ride the bus, train or subway. People in many parts of Europe and Asia have banking information stored on their phone, so that it acts as a debit card in stores and at vending machines.
“We need to be ready for that,” said Wardrop.
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