Summary
This project began as a desire to make riding the bus an easier experience. While GPS in vehicles have made it easier for individuals to get to their destinations, public transportation users have had to deal with a staggering lack of technological advancement. A typical bus rider has to deal with late buses, early buses, missing buses, and outdated bus schedules and signs--a truly information-less experience.
We used Austin's public transportation service, CapMetro, as the basis of our project. Both Hatty and Cristina have ridden the bus in Austin for numerous years, and have spent countless minutes (hours?) while waiting for the bus pondering improvements to the bus system. Our project is perhaps overly-ambitious, as it's main purpose is to redesign and add many new features to the system currently in place. While time constraints have not allowed us to fully flesh out all of our ideas, in this project we've laid out the main changes we'd like to see for CapMetro:
- Redesign of the paper bus schedule
- Creation of QUICKroute, a wallet-sized time table guide for individual routes
- Implementation of a new online mapping system
- Ability to have a CapMetro user account which allows you to subscribe to buses
- Firefox plugin called NextBus to work with online system to inform users of next buses
- Use of "pager" device (BusBot) as a simple means of finding out route info
- LED displays plus voice announcements at major bus stops to let users know of approaching buses
