Where's de bus

This year's TLF students are considering creating an application to give Bermuda's public transport users up to date information on where the buses and ferries actually are.

Transit authorities that have made this data available have found a number of benefits of bus tracking, including increased usage of public transport.

There is a thriving open source project, One Bus Away which looks like it could be used in the Bermuda environment.

A first step in getting the transport data into the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format. This provides a flexible format for transit data. It is how you specify bus stop locations, routes and timetables. Once you have your data in this format there are a number of projects that you can use to create a powerful transit application.

The One Bus Away project is an open source project that is being used in a number of US and Canadian cities. It should be usable here in Bermuda too.

Google provides good support for transit information and the Netherlands recently became the first country in the world to provide full information via their service.

Whilst this support from Google is good to have, since many tourists will be using google maps whilst visiting the island, there are benefits to being in control of your own data and websites. There are restrictions on the use of Google maps and you are not in control of future development when you use that platform. Further, users may not wish to share their location with Google due to privacy concerns.

OpenStreetMap is an free and open project to make top quality digital maps available. The Bermuda map is quite excellent. Further, there is a good open source javascript library, leaflet to create interactive maps using OpenStreetMap data.

A few months back Open Bermuda started work on a Where's de bus project during a hackathon. The challenge at that time was finding out where the actual bus stops were. It is hoped that it will be possible to get this information and full bus and ferry timetables in machine readable form from the Bermuda Transportation Board (BTB).

Given the small size of Bermuda and its transit network it would also be possible to crowd-source the data for a transit application. If live GPS data is not avaialable from BTB an alternative would be to create a mobile application that public transport users could run and use to report bus locations as well as how full the bus currently is.

There are already some open source GPS tracking systems available such as OpenGTS and Traccar that might be usable here.