Chennai: After the transport department completed geo coding process for 1,50,000 bus stops across the state, it is gearing up to implement mobile application and website that will allow the users of bus transport to view the position of their bus by January, 2019.
Sources said that a score of teams from the State Transport Undertakings (STUs) has already coded the geo position (latitude and longitude) for nearly 1,50,000 bus stops across the state and these bus stops, which are currently serviced by 22,000 plying buses across the state.
A senior official said, “after we invited proposals to develop application, we received a good response among the individuals, techies and other engineers and we have thoroughly interviewed them and selected a bidder.” They would implement the project early next year, the official added.
Officials claimed that such mobile-app would serve as the backbone of the application to be built for the bus commuters. “The applications will have details like specific stops, origin destination pairs, geo map of all the requests in a dashboard,” said another official. The data feed would be made available to the transport department in the standardized General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), he added.
When contacted a senior official, he said that such move will pave the way for various transport department and the State Transport Corporations to perform better Route Rationalization (RR) and plan the bus network better aligned to the changing need of the citizens.
“This data would also help the STUs to visualise its operations and optimise its schedules to reduce bus bunching and increase its occupancy ratio,”
Meanwhile, activists have welcomed such one. “At a time, when private mode of transpiration has such facility for commuters, such effort would bring cheers among passengers, who prefer to travel in government buses,” said Daniel Robinson, programme manager, Chennai City Connect.
