Crowdsourcing app tracks OC Transpo buses

GPS data was a boon for Ottawa transit users when it arrived on OC Transpo some years ago. But as many Ottawans can attest, it’s not always perfect when it comes to predicting accurate bus arrival times.

This week a popular transit app launched a new feature designed to show Ottawa transit users exactly where their bus is at any given moment, and it’s powered by fellow OC Transpo riders.

The new feature relies on “crowdsourced real-time transit data” to provide users of the aptly named Transit app with the ability to follow the location of the bus they’re waiting for — to the second. Think the same kind of vehicle-tracking seen on the Uber app, but instead of your approaching Uber driver’s phone shooting out location coordinates, it’s the devices of other Transit app users riding on the bus allowing you to track its movement.

In a blog post, Montreal-founded Transit announced the launch of crowdsourced real-time in Ottawa and more than 170 other cities last Thursday. It will be available for all kinds of transit vehicles, including buses and light rail in Ottawa, and Gatineau’s STO buses.

This data has been available for almost two years, collected through the app’s GO feature, but had only been released to other app users in a few pilot cities in Canada and the U.S.

GO is an optional app feature, a “guided journey companion,” Transit spokesman Stephen Miller explained.

If users choose to use GO and plug in their destination, it will tell them things like when to leave their house to get to their bus, and once they’re on the bus, when to get off at their stop. Of course, it requires the user’s location to do that.

“After millions of GO trips, we’re finally letting that location data out of its cage,” the app’s team announced in the blog post.

Transit, and many other apps like it, already relied on OC Transpo’s GPS data to track bus distance from a user’s stop. But Miller said his team sees the OC Transpo data feed take about 30 seconds to a minute to update with a bus’s new location. The app’s crowdsourced data will update second-by-second, he said. On bus lines without a GO rider, the OC Transpo GPS data is still available.

“We wanted to provide the freshest information possible to all our users.”

Crowdsourcing transit data has been tried and failed before, Transit noted in its post: “If you strap a crowdsourcing feature onto an app that has 10 users, well, yeah, you know what happens. And if you sneak background crowdsourcing into an app with millions of users — without asking permission! — say goodbye to those loyal users. You nasty battery thief!”

In this case, Transit said its user base and the fact that GO is an optin feature will help it to avoid these pitfalls.

The location data crowdsourced through GO is also anonymous, and is only shared with the app’s servers when users are in GO mode and aboard a transit vehicle.

According to Miller, tens of thousands of people in Ottawa already use the Transit app, and they generate hundreds of GO trips every day.

“Of course we do want to increase that and we want to see more people providing information to their fellow riders.”

David Galbraith is one of those Ottawa Transit app users. When asked about its new feature, while waiting for his bus at Bayshore station, Galbraith said he thinks it’s a “great idea.”

“Transit is the most reliable app, I’ve found so far, and any way to make that more reliable and the commute easier I think is the best thing for Ottawa.”

Fellow bus rider Erik Nosaluk pointed out that apps such as Google Maps have already been utilizing user location data to provide information on traffic congestion.

“If any app is going to be using that for transit, I’m a big fan.”

But Sarah Morrison, a longtime OC Transpo user, said she’d like to see how the new feature works for other people before jumping on the Transit train.

“It’s like reading reviews before you buy something.”

To attract more users, Transit has added what it calls “gamification” aspects to its new feature, showing users how many nearby riders they’re helping by sharing their location, and giving them a “helpfulness rank” on every bus line they ride.

“You can compete to be the king or queen of your line,” Miller said.

“In order to crowdsource information, you really need people regularly using it. So by adding a bit of a competitive spirit to it ... people, we hope, are going to use GO more often and provide real-time tracking information to more users.”

As for battery and data drain, the app’s website said a 20-minute bus trip using the GO feature would eat up about five per cent of a phone’s battery power and 100k of data.