GPS Bus-tracking on the cheap

Get a spatio-temporal lock on your local flavor of public transportation.  Answer the age-old question, "Where's that bus?" and put it on the internet for the Public Good.  Keep yourself out of the weather by predicting bus arrival times.

Costs:
   $100-200 per vehicle per year
+ $120 per year for serverspace to track the fleet.

Other requirements: 
Instamapper account (free),
Python data-grabber/calculator code (provided free-of-charge below),
Permission.

Check the demo system here: http://weakorbit.com (the prototypes may be turned off and the positions could be old..)

Step 1 Why? ..and an Overview

Why might you want such a system?  I wanted it because my school's bus schedule was all out of whack during exams.  Myself and others were waiting 15-30 minutes for a lift in the un-sheltered cold because we didn't know when to expect a bus. 

For the 'common' routes at my school, buses are quite dependable during the year.  The peculiar and longer routes can mess up timing though.  It comes down to giving bus-riders more control over their time; making public trans more pleasurable and less of a hassle will encourage ridership [admittedly sizeable citation needed here].

Is it really that cheap?  In the worst case scenario this will cost $350 for one bus for the first year.  Additional buses would cost $200 for the first year.  Each bus at my university serves, say, 1200 people/week.  Eight months of school gives 38,400 riders/bus/year.  So the first bus costs one penny per rider, a good ballpark figure for the 'is it worth it' question.  I'll try to include some more detailed economiks (hah, by that I mean division) in a later step.


Here's the way it works:
1) Buy a GPS-enabled prepaid phone
2) Download Instamapper (IM) software to the phone and get an IM account
3) Create custom route file for your bus of choice
4) Run server-side Python script to scrape data from IM, interpret it based on your route file, and put it on your website

Comments

[lemonie]

They said "no"?
How many buses do they have, and what would be the plan for identifying which vehicle was on your route today if this were ever implemented?

L

[_mattb]

Well, the question hasn't been formally posed to the university transportation authorities yet.  This instructable will be part of a proposal I hope to send them before the end of January.

I don't know exactly how many buses they have in the fleet.  I would guess 25 with 15 in operation each day..?  Each bus could carry a phone and the route it's traveling could be auto-detected based on which waypoints the bus hits (was that your question?).

[lemonie]

Ah, so we may see this updated next year.
Yes I see the principle of auto-detecting the routes, it sounds promising. I guess you could also check the drivers weren't speeding or diverting to places they shouldn't....?

L

[_mattb]

Well, there won't really be anything to add once the phones are in the buses.. 

Sure; though this system is not intended to monitor drivers, it could.  The phones and InstaMapper actually output a guess at the device's speed (and an elevation and heading) but these three parameters may be unreliable. 

[dchall8]

This should be a "Featured" Instructable. 

Maybe I missed it, but how do you keep the phone's battery charged?

[_mattb]

Thanks very much.  The phone must be tied into the vehicle's electrical system for a more permanent installation.  Though I haven't tried it myself, several methods are proposed in the InstaMapper how-to.