Tracking Buses, Saving Time

Reported November 2009

SEATTLE, Wash. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Public transportation saves 855 million gallons of gas each year. If you want to go green, but you don’t want to wait forever for the next bus, there's a new, free service that gets rid of the bus stop guesswork.

Brian Ferris loves riding the bus, but he hates the wait. So he took a decade old desktop bus locator program and made it better.

"I am a computer science student,“ Ferris, a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, told Ivanhoe. “I have the capability to program stuff, to hack together and I said, 'Why not make it better? I can build something I can use, but other people could use too.'"

In his free time and with about $100, Ferris developed the One Bus Way mobile technology. It tracks your bus on any mobile device.

Whether it’s a laptop, an iPhone or a cell phone, One Bus Away helps you pinpoint your bus’s arrival. A computerized voice reads off the arrival times. Every day, one-bus-away gets 1,500 calls, thousands of web hits and hundreds of text messages. That’s more traffic than the city’s official transit page. This is all with no budget.

"When you are standing at the bus stop and you don’t have the information, it seems to take forever for the bus to get there,“ bus rider Keri Edison Watkins told Ivanhoe. “So it's 5 minutes until the bus comes, but it feels like it's 10 minutes."

Open source software makes the service free and easy to use and improve by anyone, anywhere sick of waiting for the bus.

One Bus Away started in Seattle, but is quickly spreading. The researchers have talked with transit agencies across the country and hope one day the program will help you get anywhere in the country -- maybe even the world. For more information, visit
www.onebusaway.org.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.-USA, contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Brian Ferris
University of Washington
(206) 303-8220
bdferris@cs.washington.edu

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
IEEE
Pender McCarter
IEEE http://www.ieee.org
IEEE-USA http://www.ieeeusa.org
p.mccarter@ieee.org

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