Except that quickly becomes inaccurate if the bus driver decides to re-open the doors for an incoming passenger, or due to traffic conditions, opens the bus doors further from the stop than the beacon reaches. Or skips a stop due to road conditions.

1. Set a minimum time until next stop can be announced 2. Add a button to skip a stop

And then when the driver accidentally hits the button and needs to go back?

Notice how we're now adding more complexity now anyway though...

> Set a minimum time until next stop can be announced

This feels like a dangerous hack that will come back to bite you in any number of unexpected scenarios that probably occur frequently during an average bus driver's day.

Consider a bus stuck in traffic. It is not unusual, at least in London, for a driver to open/close the door multiple times between stops when traffic moves slowly enough, often with longer intervals in between than there usually would be between stops.

RFID like chips on bus stops too, maybe?

While active RFID is possible, other radio tech designed to work as beacons is more likely

Bluetooth beacon (estimote?) at stops would help.

This has all kind of usability issues (now you're expecting the driver to pay attention to and correct mistakes), while providing less accurate data (buss pulls away from stop, gets stuck in traffic; estimates at next stop are based on the bus having pulled away and average times; customers gets angry) and less ability to do traffic management (e.g. spacing out buses by slowing down later buses slightly) without having drivers guessing and reporting data back.

> For maximal accuracy simply have an electronic beacon of any sort broadcasting an ID that corresponds to the stop and you've got it solved.

That's not remotely accurate for the reason above.

> And the entire data set for the route should be able to live offline onboard the bus. Changing bus/numbers routes should include the step for updating route data.

It can. E.g. the old London system used odometers. But that was sufficient only for showing "next stop ..." and for reporting very rough estimates. Today it uses odometers, gps, rate gyros and turn rate sensors to be able to more accurately position the buses along a route, and they still regularly "give up" and take a bus off the schedule when traffic conditions means the uncertainty is too high.

For an robust system I would use multiple data streams including bust status data/beacons/GPS. I've seen busses with offset stations.

3G is necessary for live ETA, if you want to get fancy. All these complications, in my view, are worth it if you want a system that works 24/7 and serves thousands of people daily. The HW and SW dev costs are acceptable, but it does need a decent team, depending on what the starting point is and the ability of the team members.

> For maximal accuracy simply have an electronic beacon of any sort broadcasting an ID that corresponds to the stop and you've got it solved.

Yeah, and now we need to install and manage thousands of beacons in bus stops in pretty hospitable conditions.

Of course, GPS isnt perfect either. It tends to fail in CBD areas.

changing bus/numbers routes manually is not feasible. in complex networks this happens daily a hundred times.

I've worked in transit. This is not only feasible, it is how it is done.

cannot see why you would want to do it manually. it is done automatically in munchen.

I'm confused, are you suggesting there are places where bus routes change hundreds of times a day?

I can't imagine many reasons a route would have to change on short notice (accident blocking a road?), and in those situations the announcements not quite being right would not be the end of the world.

Buses are often assigned to a route and then leave that route unexpectedly in the middle of the day to service another route (accident, other bus broke down, traffic, subway shutdown etc) , often not starting at the beginning of that route.

Then the bus changes its route number - certainly in the UK I see the drivers punching in the route details when they take over a bus.

Oh right, that makes more sense. I guess you could just keep a record of all the different routes in every bus though? And skip to the right spot manually as needed.