Chennai: ITR invites proposals to develop real-time bus app

Chennai: In a major initiative to improve the user experience of the bus passengers in the state, the Institute of Road Transport (IRT) and the transport department have invited proposals for developing a 'mobile application' and website that will allow the users of bus transport to view the position of their bus in real-time.

Documents accessed by Deccan Chronicle show that the transport department and various State Transport Undertakings (STUs) have been preparing for this project in the last few months. 

Further, a score of teams from the STUs has already coded the geo position (latitude and longitude) of all the nearly 1,50,000 bus stops across the state and these bus stops would currently be serviced by 22,000 plying buses across the state. Such mobile-app would serve as the backbone of the application to be built for the bus commuters.

“The commuters, after implementation of such project, will be able to track the live position of the bus across the state. Further, users, through such service, will be able to plan the entire journey from door to door, which means that the directions will include the walking distance between the residence and the nearest stop,” the document noted, suggesting the commuters to use the Google map interface for more wider adoption.

Stating that the transport department will on a continuous basis be able to see the number of app downloads, user requests of routes, specific stops that have the highest request, origin destination pairs, geo map of all the requests in a dashboard, the department noted that the data feed will be made available to the transport department in the standardized General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS).

“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,” it pointed out. This data would also help the STUs to visualize its operations and optimize its schedules to reduce bus bunching and increase its occupancy ratio, read the document.

Importantly, the proposals require the service provider to provide an application in the various time offices of the State Transport Corporations for real-time synching of the operated bus and the schedule. 

“The proposal calls for a preference of IP 67 / IP 68 devices considering the operating conditions and weather conditions in the state. Prospective bidders and also enthusiasts can find more details about the proposals (Locate Access My Bus) at http://www.tenders.tn.gov.in,” it said.