If it is busses that show their live position and ETA until your pickup location, that would be a significant improvement on the status quo. Bus schedules tend to be pretty unreliable in areas with traffic.

Busses already do that in many places around the world and seem to handle variable traffic as gracefully as possible.

So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time. In a free market you would allow competitors to enter with a better product and displace the one that's falling behind. Hopefully this will be a step in the right direction

    > So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time

This is ubiquitous in even small Canadian cities, like Thunder Bay and Sault, though it often comes through a partnership with the Transit app (which I have complex feelings about -- the ubiquity is nice, but having a publicly-funded option would be better, and I question whether Transit is doing anything underhanded with usage data; the app has a paid plan, but it's plenty usable without it).

I live in a bigger city (Toronto), and speaking from experience, locations tend to be accurate to within a minute or so on most routes, and the app does a good job of telling you about route changes due to maintenance or detours due to construction.

Pre-Transit, Ottawa -- a medium-sized city in its own right -- had a system where you'd text a service your bus stop number and it'd give you the next bus's estimated next pass at that stop; I know that early on, that just did a lookup of the static bus schedule, but I believe it eventually started using live location data (though by that time I was using early versions of Transit anyway).

The US has this problem where transit gets continuously underfunded and people then act surprised when it's sub par. Canadian transit needs a lot of love, but US transit's consistently been some of the worst I've ever had to use.

Is funding really the problem? I don't know why it would cost so much to put a tracker on the bus and have someone build an app. Or even just posting the location to a website, or maybe text message? I understand digging tunnels under NYC would be expensive but this seems like it would be a great bang for the buck in terms of convenience

> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places?

Probably because voters and politicians in those places don't value public transportation.

My colleagues who studied this issue told me that there were several patents on bus tracking, making it cost prohibitive for many cities.

It also led to the Tiramisu project, which used people's smartphones to track buses and how crowded those buses were. https://tiramisutransit.com/

Public transit agencies are not free to pick the best suppliers; there are political considerations at best and outright corruption at worst.

Real-time bus tracking is available in the all the cities Uber is testing this service in.

Outfitting hundreds or thousands of busses costs a lot of money. Maintaining the equipment costs more money.

The lack of availability comes down to priorities. Most bus agencies don't have the spare cash lying around to do this.

Buses also tend to destroy roads. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

Are you sure it ISN'T available?

It's the norm in my "City" of 60k that nobody ever thinks about.

Fuck, it was the situation with the contracted, private buses used to shuttle people back and forth in my split campus college.

Is it available where you are and you just don't realize?

It's a service that any municipality can purchase.

I live in a second-world country and we have had live bus position tracking and ETA since about 8 years ago.

In some countries like Netherlands, bus stops can even have LCD displays that show you a live ETA or any disruptions/cancellations without needing an app

The MTA in NYC can't seem to make this work correctly for trains

At our (penultimate aboveground) stop you can look down the track and see if there are any trains waiting - even if there aren't, the live board still likes to claim there's one 'coming in a minute'

My only guess is it works off of what should be happening, and not what actually is going on

It works fine for the trains and busses, you either don't live in NYC or don't know what you're talking about? The MTA app and displays are almost dead on accurate for arrival times for the busses and trains. Sometimes there's a minute or so of a difference from reality but that's more than small enough to be useful.

I was talking specifically about the display boards, not the app

The thing with these startups, and Uber in general, is that they are forcing these industries to do the upgrades in technology that should have done on their own already but weren't doing because they had the industry captured previously. The downside to Uber is that there is little stopping taxi and bus services from improving their end user experiences and pushing Uber back out of those spaces. Buses at least are ran by municipalities that are slow up change, so Uber has time to get established there. It's insane that taxis didn't kill Uber in it's infancy though.

Like this? https://traintimes.org.uk/map/london-buses/#9

? This has been standard for a long time even in the US

Busses already do that, I can look up right now where the next bus on my stop is, its ETA (also displayed on the stop's signaling), and it's usually right on time.

Small point: I think the ETA is based on the position of the bus and how long it would take to drive to your stop in perfect conditions. It doesn't take into account traffic or any other road blockages or accidents like Google Maps or others.

At least this is how I've observed it working here on AC Transit in the bay area. Many times I have sat at a bus stop for 25 minutes waiting for a bus that was always five minutes away.

Here in NYC the MTA bus time app is pretty accurate, Google Maps's timing for bus arrivals I've never seen be accurate on the other hand.

It does consider traffic, reroutes in case of need, etc. but that doesn't really affect bus times here, heavy traffic roads have exclusive bus lanes, inner roads don't tend to have much traffic even during rush hour.

It's really hard to see this as an improvement to publicly funded systems when there's not really any reason we couldn't have this in said systems.

This is yet another erosion to public ownership of infrastructure that will be lauded by hyper-capitalists as a good thing. This whole "enshittification" trend occurs because of the pressure to constantly squeeze a percent more out of consumers each quarter than the last. Why are we handing everything over to that? This service is -literally- guaranteed to get worse and/or more expensive over time.

The reason I run into when thinking on late stage capitalism improvements is: "People want the chance to be rich". We vote and support all this private ownership because we want to keep that window open that that owner could be us.

Renters bemoan their landlord and also they're reading how to invest in real estate, rent out an ADU, and run 5 airbnbs. It's always real estate for your average person to climb the wealth ladder.

I'm stuck on that reality, people don't seem to want shared resources?

... I'm not sure I've been anywhere where they don't do that in the last few years? It's inherently a little unreliable (in particular, it's hard to know ahead of time what dwell time at a stop will be, or if the bus will even need to stop at the stop), but it's fairly standard these days.

This thing is a good interface to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(app)

In many countries bus stops also have electronic signs indicating when the next buses are coming. Here's a thing from 15 years ago about their introduction in Dublin, which is not exactly world-leading, transport-wise: https://www.archiseek.com/discussion/topic/rtpi-coming-to-a-...

There are many places where private busses are the norm; in many countries these private operates have been crowded-out by subsidized governmental competitors, but there may be room for some now.

I miss the Peter Pan bus system in western Massachusetts. Last time I rode buses daily. https://peterpanbus.com/locations/massachusetts/

> There are many places where private busses are the norm

And 90% of those places are developing countries, just sayin'.

Well, no. In a low density US city a bus route goes into all the places where nobody is waiting in the name of increasing coverage. Adding more routes is impossible due to lack of funding. This makes it take 2-3 times as long as a car to get anywhere, which it then makes buses transportation of last resort. Which further decreases ridership and funding.

A municipal service cannot implement on-demand hailing because it has to serve the one or two people who can't use a phone (never mind that it would be cheaper to hire a personal assistant for them to book their rides). And so innovation is left to private enterprises.

Here come the downvotes! However, on a sibling thread about on-demand buses in China the same folks will praise innovation...

Another thing that happens is that social services (healthcare, DMV, probation office, welfare) move offices out of expensive transit dense areas to cheap far flung offices. Then local governments force bus routing to these places, it leads to a miserable experience for everyone involved.

The best measure of a transit project is "How many people use this per day". ie is it doing something valuable.

Note: I don't know of a solution for this other than more holistic government service planning. I do think it's valuable and good that those in need of government services can get there without a car. But it isn't always the sole fault of transit agencies that they have low ridership slow busses.

Government services that move to remote offices to "save on rent" should be required to fund out of their budgets the new bus route that is now required for people to get there. Suddenly the "savings" isn't so much.

Transportation and real estate are two sides of the same coin. They should be part of the same plan and budget. Each bureaucracy whether public or private has its own mission and budget. It’s often easier to dump a problem onto another organization so you can declare victory on your organization staying on time and under budget.

This isn't true. Municipal routes can be optimized to serve the majority of people, and then a ride hailing service can be offered to feed off-route users into the fixed-route network. Most transit agencies offer this service, and many offer full-on ride-hailing (example: C-TRAN's "The Current" in Vancouver, WA).

I don't know where this "can't use a phone" thing comes from. ADA requires that transit services above a certain size offer paratransit, but doesn't specify how those rides are booked. I haven't run into anyone who can't make phone calls and can't book rides online.

It can be faster by car than by bus even in high density and high bus ridership London. It is very variable by route and time of day, and I am assuming there is no rail option.

LA Metro's bus system covers most of LA County (1,447 square miles), ranking it among the top in terms of geographic coverage. In terms of ridership, it is second only to the NYC bus system in the U.S., and is among the top 20 in terms of ridership globally.

LA Metro also offers an on-demand hailed shuttle in several neighborhoods (Metro Micro). And has for several years, including several partnerships with Uber and Lyft that were ultimately terminated because private companies can't offer micromobility services as efficiently as a public agency can. Metro Micro costs a fraction of what LA Metro was paying Uber and Lyft but provides more rides in more neighborhoods.

LA Metro also has more e-bike coverage than any of the private e-bike services, most of which are now bankrupt.

> Here come the downvotes!

Government/municipal transit exists, in part, to service a “long tail” of need among the residents. Its goal is not innovation but reliable presence for many.

There is room for private taxis, buses and trains full of people, private cars, bikes, etc. in the wide distribution of transportation modes.

Transport depends on a good network of places you can get to. That is why transit tends to be a monopoly - if there are two players there are places you can't get to so you want whoever you selected to serve more places.

Note that I count roads as one of your transport networks.

It says maximum of 3 people in a ride (at least the current plan) so not really.

It is also not sarcastic to point out that a bus is a bus.