Real-time bus tracking is one of civic technology’s easier calls. No one likes guessing when next bus will come: “Do I need to run for it?”, “Do I have time to duck into that corner store and get a newspaper?”, etc. So people immediately grasp the benefit of being able to ask their smartphone where the next bus is.
Wait — I know what you’re thinking: “Not everyone has a smartphone.
Don’t be such a techno-élitist!” And you’d be absolutely right.
That’s why the way in which New York City is setting up their bus-tracking system is important:
The big win in civic technology is to build systems that become platforms upon which anyone can build new services, whether volunteer, commercial, or cross-governmental. And that’s exactly how New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is doing it. Starting with their pilot of real-time bus-tracking along the B63 route in Brooklyn, and now expanding to Staten Island
in the next phase, and then ultimately to the entire city, they are
building an architecture that explicitly supports the development of new
and varied applications beyond what MTA produces itself. More on that
in a minute.
Procuring for an open architecture
What’s particularly interesting about this project is how it was
structured as an open platform from the very beginning — starting with
the procurement of the various components. The MTA separated the
project into a software side and a hardware side. That might sound
obvious, but it’s actually not how a lot of civic procurement happens.
More typically, a city requests to buy a whole solution in one piece,
and each interested vendor submits a bid encompassing every aspect of
the project: the server software, the on-bus hardware that reports the
bus’s position, the mobile phone applications and web applications to
query the server, public display units… everything, the whole enchilada.
more about NYC:
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