MTC BUSES CAN BE NOW TRACKED THROUGH WEBSITE
Posted on: 22/Oct/2010 12:27:31 AM
The MTC has undertaken pilot project of mapping the routes; seven routes have been mapped Chennai City Connect, an NGO. CCC is a consultant to MTC on issues concerning city�s transportation. After completion of mapping of all the routes, the public could soon track 600 plus GPS enabled buses in the city.
The Google Transit, a public transportation planning tool, already has the schedule data of those routes in a standardized format on General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS).
According to Daniel Robinson, a coordinator at Chennai City Connect said that the idea was to publish all the data in a usable, open format so that individual developers can create third party applications.
For example, Mr. Robinson says you can plan your own �Discover Chennai` trail by selecting the historic spots that you want to visit and the application would give you the best route along with timings. With more than 5.2 million passengers using MTC services every day, even minor tweaks to improve the passenger experience would have a profound impact, he said.
The websites of �Washington Metro` and �Transport for London` offer multi-modal trip planning services. An option is also available for commuters to plan the trip using two different modes (bus and train) or two different buses. Immediately after the websites were introduced, public transport ridership in the two cities went up by 18 per cent according to Mr. Robinson.
According to a study undertaken by Anna University public will be able to know if the bus is crowded apart from knowing about the bus�s timing.
Electronic ticketing machines that register passenger details digitally such as boarding/alighting times are in place in some of the MTC buses.
The GPS unit on-board MTC buses inform the control tower every 10 th second the position of the vehicle and the occupancy level in the vehicle.
The project is under final testing stage. It will be evaluated by experts before put into application.
