What’s your idea?
The idea is to provide people with the bus information they want in an easy and accessible form. The information already exists, it is just available in very poor forms and this service could be massively improved. For example, the number on a bus doesn’t describe a route very well – but a plot on Google Maps would; GPS bus data is displayed on the monitors at the bus stop indicating wait times – but provided earlier it could alert for delays, indicate departure times and even provide the best route for a timely journey.
What’s really new about this idea?
I didn’t come up with the idea – the concept is well known – I do however have the determination and motivation to see it be executed effectively! Bus companies are old traditional companies and their mobile and internet strategies are not a major focus for them (except TFL).
From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?
The idea is about ’stage three’ – I have spoken to a bunch of developers who are very passionate about solving this, and many citizen-like people who wish this to be solved, and of course I have spoken to the local bus company who don’t see that there is a problem. There is no official team for this project yet but the product and tasks are well defined. I would be hoping to establish the team at Social Innovation Camp. I would expect that there is already one or two developers willing to contribute but there is a need for more developers, designers, UX specialists, campaign managers and testers.
What can we do for you?
Social Innovation Camp could provide a perfect ‘base-camp’ for this idea – I would hope for a team to form and a prototype to come out of the weekend. The developers are willing to do all this work for free anyway, but the potential to attract media attention, buzz and passionate designers and campaigners would be extremely difficult otherwise. I’m going to attempt this project as a volunteer effort to the City of Edinburgh anyway but I feel it could accelerate to success through Social Innovation Camp!
Designers and developers etc are crucial. Mentors with good connections would be really nice. And of course donations would be nice, but really a charity project.
If Social Innovation Camp is able to help push your idea forward, do you have the time or desire to take ownership of it?
I can run the project afterwards but am also happy for others to do so.
This idea was submitted by Sam Collins.
Sam is a full time student until tomorrow afternoon (final exam). I am the founder of Tech Meetup which is a not-for-profit community movement to bring together the tech scene around Edinburgh, Glasgow and soon Newcastle and Aberdeen. I also work full time with Hedout, a mobile startup where I am the strategy/marketing/biz dev/finance team.
For fun Sam fixes things. Not chairs or tables, but real life things like the disparate tech scene in Scotland or the public transport systems – I’m also working on getting rid of wasteful paper like receipts, tickets, and business cards (stay tuned…).
June 1st, 2009 at 12:46 pm
[…] Fix the Freakin Buses The very simple idea behind this is to put all the bus timetable data into a searchable, accessible form and plot it on a map. It got the judges excited, however, because they saw its potential as a campaigning tool to highlight the places where’s a real demand for transport but no provision - a particular problem in rural areas. So the next stage of Fix the Freakin Buses might be to get users uploading the journeys they make but are poorly served by existing transport links to surface demand for new routes. Finally, the idea could incorporate ways for people to solve the transport problem themselves through using tools like Liftshare. […]
June 1st, 2009 at 12:49 pm
[…] Fix the Freakin Buses The very simple idea behind this is to put all the bus timetable data into a searchable, accessible form and plot it on a map. It got the judges excited, however, because they saw its potential as a campaigning tool to highlight the places where’s a real demand for transport but no provision - a particular problem in rural areas. So the next stage of Fix the Freakin Buses might be to get users uploading the journeys they make but are poorly served by existing transport links to surface demand for new routes. Finally, the idea could incorporate ways for people to solve the transport problem themselves through using tools like Liftshare. […]
June 2nd, 2009 at 9:46 am
[…] Fix the Freakin Buses : interesting points about: highlighting gaps in provision (esp. in rural areas – we have plenty of those); user experiences; providing a framework for users to canvas & build their own solutions. […]
June 9th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
I put this little site together a while back for Edinburgh buses
http://hillviewroad.com/buses.html
It’s very “alpha” and has plenty still to do (might not work in IE…).
Move your mouse around the map and the route numbers at the top should highlight. Mouse over the route numbers and the route should be displayed.
Click on a route number … most of the popup menu items don’t yet work, but this allows you to keep a route shown while you pan/zoom the map.
It screen scraps the data from http://www.mybustracker.co.uk/ (the data they send the client for a single route is often more than the data you need to download to get the same amount of detail for *every* route in Edinburgh on my version, simply by cleaning up their data … which isn’t trivial).
The data might be a little out of date now too. Plus the data on mybustracker had obvious errors in it that sometime show quite bizarre routes. Anyway - sharing it more in the hope it helps ideas flow around the original idea on sicamp.org
You can get me if you email murray@ the hillview domain at the top.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:41 am
I would be happy to privately share my correspondence with Transport for London around bus location information. I could also put you in touch with people at TfL working in this area.