If it is busses that show their live position and ETA until your pickup location, that would be a significant improvement on the status quo. Bus schedules tend to be pretty unreliable in areas with traffic.
So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time. In a free market you would allow competitors to enter with a better product and displace the one that's falling behind. Hopefully this will be a step in the right direction
> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time
This is ubiquitous in even small Canadian cities, like Thunder Bay and Sault, though it often comes through a partnership with the Transit app (which I have complex feelings about -- the ubiquity is nice, but having a publicly-funded option would be better, and I question whether Transit is doing anything underhanded with usage data; the app has a paid plan, but it's plenty usable without it).
I live in a bigger city (Toronto), and speaking from experience, locations tend to be accurate to within a minute or so on most routes, and the app does a good job of telling you about route changes due to maintenance or detours due to construction.
Pre-Transit, Ottawa -- a medium-sized city in its own right -- had a system where you'd text a service your bus stop number and it'd give you the next bus's estimated next pass at that stop; I know that early on, that just did a lookup of the static bus schedule, but I believe it eventually started using live location data (though by that time I was using early versions of Transit anyway).
The US has this problem where transit gets continuously underfunded and people then act surprised when it's sub par. Canadian transit needs a lot of love, but US transit's consistently been some of the worst I've ever had to use.
Is funding really the problem? I don't know why it would cost so much to put a tracker on the bus and have someone build an app. Or even just posting the location to a website, or maybe text message? I understand digging tunnels under NYC would be expensive but this seems like it would be a great bang for the buck in terms of convenience
I live in a second-world country and we have had live bus position tracking and ETA since about 8 years ago.
In some countries like Netherlands, bus stops can even have LCD displays that show you a live ETA or any disruptions/cancellations without needing an app
The MTA in NYC can't seem to make this work correctly for trains
At our (penultimate aboveground) stop you can look down the track and see if there are any trains waiting - even if there aren't, the live board still likes to claim there's one 'coming in a minute'
My only guess is it works off of what should be happening, and not what actually is going on
It works fine for the trains and busses, you either don't live in NYC or don't know what you're talking about? The MTA app and displays are almost dead on accurate for arrival times for the busses and trains. Sometimes there's a minute or so of a difference from reality but that's more than small enough to be useful.
The thing with these startups, and Uber in general, is that they are forcing these industries to do the upgrades in technology that should have done on their own already but weren't doing because they had the industry captured previously. The downside to Uber is that there is little stopping taxi and bus services from improving their end user experiences and pushing Uber back out of those spaces. Buses at least are ran by municipalities that are slow up change, so Uber has time to get established there. It's insane that taxis didn't kill Uber in it's infancy though.
... I'm not sure I've been anywhere where they don't do that in the last few years? It's inherently a little unreliable (in particular, it's hard to know ahead of time what dwell time at a stop will be, or if the bus will even need to stop at the stop), but it's fairly standard these days.
In many countries bus stops also have electronic signs indicating when the next buses are coming. Here's a thing from 15 years ago about their introduction in Dublin, which is not exactly world-leading, transport-wise: https://www.archiseek.com/discussion/topic/rtpi-coming-to-a-...
Busses already do that, I can look up right now where the next bus on my stop is, its ETA (also displayed on the stop's signaling), and it's usually right on time.
Small point: I think the ETA is based on the position of the bus and how long it would take to drive to your stop in perfect conditions. It doesn't take into account traffic or any other road blockages or accidents like Google Maps or others.
At least this is how I've observed it working here on AC Transit in the bay area. Many times I have sat at a bus stop for 25 minutes waiting for a bus that was always five minutes away.
It does consider traffic, reroutes in case of need, etc. but that doesn't really affect bus times here, heavy traffic roads have exclusive bus lanes, inner roads don't tend to have much traffic even during rush hour.
It's really hard to see this as an improvement to publicly funded systems when there's not really any reason we couldn't have this in said systems.
This is yet another erosion to public ownership of infrastructure that will be lauded by hyper-capitalists as a good thing. This whole "enshittification" trend occurs because of the pressure to constantly squeeze a percent more out of consumers each quarter than the last. Why are we handing everything over to that? This service is -literally- guaranteed to get worse and/or more expensive over time.
The reason I run into when thinking on late stage capitalism improvements is: "People want the chance to be rich". We vote and support all this private ownership because we want to keep that window open that that owner could be us.
Renters bemoan their landlord and also they're reading how to invest in real estate, rent out an ADU, and run 5 airbnbs. It's always real estate for your average person to climb the wealth ladder.
I'm stuck on that reality, people don't seem to want shared resources?
