Many of us go to office using a bus. It would be really nice if we can track what is the status of the bus before we leave. Then we can easily track the time of arrival and then go to the bus stop according to that. We can make an android and an ios app for that. It can be even a website.
Right now the app needs data source.
I have knowledge that all buses have gps locators installed but we just need to talk to the proper authority and get permissions to read the data.
When i last spoke to BMTC about this (early 2012), they told me that the GPS don't work properly and the vendor had disappeared :-) They had issued a new contract to redo the whole system, but i'm not sure it is implemented yet.
Instead can you think of how to do this crowdsourced? Perhaps when someone gets on the bus, they can press a button. (when they leave the bus, you may be able to infer that from their movement)
You need to incentivize people to use this app. How about something like, when they press the button, they can pick their destination, and the app will intelligently calculate the ETA (based on historical data, google route, and traffic data - for the hackathon, you can just use google route+traffic data to begin with)
Yeah good idea Gaurav. We can try again and talk to BMTC and if they are still on the same state then we can easily make it crowdsourced. I had also thought of it before but wasn't sure whether people would be interested enough to do that every day. Hoping that they will be. Anyways please upvote the thing. Don't know whether the voting thing matters or not for the project to be picked up. Also am really interested in the second part of the suggestion you have made. Looking forward to work on it.
Nice and interesting idea..
Provide all BMTC drivers a smartphone with an app to enter bus route number and start the tracking, whenever start a route.