Open-Source, Real-Time Bus Tracking Is Coming to All of New York City

Update: New from the City of New York: “Interactive Map Shows NYC Street Closures” (via NBC New York)
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Via TechPresident:

New York City’s public transit provider, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is set to pour millions of dollars into a high-tech project that will give New Yorkers a real-time view into the exact location of every bus in the city.
Last year, the transit authority announced BusTime, a pilot project on the B63 bus route running through Brooklyn. With a GPS tracking device on each bus, software and firmware developed by the open-source civic hacking shop OpenPlans, and a little marketing, the MTA’s New York City Transit division had created a way for riders to send a text message to a specific shortcode — using a code unique to the bus stop where they were standing — and get an automated response telling them exactly how far away the next bus was. At a cost of $265,000, the transit provider hadn’t found a way to fix the tendency for buses to get stacked one immediately behind the other or to get caught in traffic — but it was a start.
Today, the MTA announced that this project will immediately go live in the borough of Staten Island — which has buses and a light rail line but no subway — and will be in all five boroughs by 2013. BusTime data will be available through an API, a web dashboard, via SMS and by using QR codes.
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The main lead on software will be OpenPlans, where the transportation group now has another sizeable contract that will reduce the extent to which the non-profit must lean on founder Mark Gorton’s largesse to keep operations afloat.

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See Also: Official News Release and Videos
See Also: Chicago, NYC Now Providing Real-Time Snow Plow Maps (January 5, 2011)

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