The overhaul of 34th St. continues.
Updated 1:50 p.m.: As the city and the MTA continue the joint project that will turn 34th St. into a river-to-river transitway, New Yorkers will again witness yet another attempt by the MTA to implement bus arrival boards. The latest iteration of bus-tracking technology will use satellite and GPS technology to bring passengers along 34th St. real-time arrival information.
For the MTA, bus-tracking technology has turned into something of a bugaboo. The agency has spent the better part of two decades and countless millions in attempts that have failed to bring a technology readily available throughout the world online in New York. In March, I eulogized the bus tracking plan as the MTA killed it for the second time. Now, though, agency and city officials claim they have found the winning combination. So will the third time be the charm or will it be three strikes for the MTA’s technology implementation efforts?
Michael Grynbaum had the news on City Room this morning:
Electronic countdown displays will be installed at shelters along the heavily trafficked 34th Street crosstown route, allowing riders to see how many minutes are left until the next bus shows up, according to two officials familiar with the plans.
Satellite tracking and GPS devices will allow computers at the bus stop to estimate arrival times, as part of a pilot program organized by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city’s transportation department. The project is set to be announced on Tuesday by city officials, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
The bus-tracking technology will be installed and provided without charge by Clever Devices, a Long Island firm that implemented a similar system in Chicago in 2006, the officials said. After an initial pilot stage, the Chicago program, called Bus Tracker, was later expanded to that city’s entire bus route, and now includes online and mobile applications.
So this time, the MTA and DOT are going with a company that, based on its website, actually seems to know what it’s doing. That’s a relief.
Meanwhile, according to Grynbaum’s story, Mayor Bloomberg compared the 34th St. implementation to military tracking. The mayor said the project will rely on “mesh network technology, similar to that used to track military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
According to Streetsblog, the arrival boards at eight stations along the street are up and running right now. I’ll try to get some pictures later in the week. Meanwhile, neither the MTA nor city has expressed any plans for a city-wide implementation if this 34th St. test is successful. I have to believe, however, that this program will quickly expand if Clever Devices can deliver. It’s about time.
10 comments
i don’t see why this is a priority. for the subway, timers are very welcome. for a bus, you can look down the street, and besides surface traffic is hard to predict (tho’, yes, it would be easier if they turn 34th into a real thoroughfare).
Do you take buses at all? The fact that surface transportation is “hard to predict” is precisely why we need to know if a bus is estimated to be 2 minutes away versus 50 minutes. Bus service is extremely irregular compared to the subway due to traffic, so any additional information that riders can get regarding how long it would take for the bus to get to them would be highly welcomed.
why yes george, as a lifelong resident of manhattan island i have taken buses! and since surface traffic is hard to predict, how is this system going to predict how long the bus will be? by giving estimations? what benefit is that, since the constant ebb and flow of surface traffic will cause those estimations to change, maybe every 2 minutes? could you post something a little more helpful? thanks!
Sure. If a bus is said to be 2 minutes away, then its quite obvious that the bus is getting closer to you, and that in normal traffic conditions you would be seeing the bus in 2 minutes. If the time board seems to be stuck @ 2 minutes for a lot more than that then it becomes obvious that there is a traffic jam somewhere. All of this is easily understood.
Now if it says 50 minutes until the next bus, then it is also obvious that you should be thinking about taking the next empty cab that you see.
Hope this helps you in understanding how useful these things can be.
Buses can have systems that know which station they’re at. That’s how smart card readers know how much to charge you when you tap out in cities with distance-based fares, such as Singapore. They can communicate this information to a GPS network, which then sends the information to screens at the stations.
Looks like the MTA finally figured out how to overcome that whole GPS-signals-are-blocked-by-skyscrapers “problem” they’ve been using…er, um…facing for years. Maybe they can pass this ground breaking technological wonder on to the people at TomTom, Garmin, et al.
I have to agree on this. Maybe the 34th Street corridor has a better sky view; with the exception of the ESB, it seems towers are generally lower along 34th Street. But I often have used GPS coming into the city and have left it on only to hear “Unable to get GPS signal” over and over again; thank goodness for Google Maps when in a pinch. Station-based location systems might work better, but I’d have to research more into the history of this bus GPS history with the MTA.
GPS is not a “2-way” communications network. GPS satellites broadcast (one-way) a signal to earth. When a GPS receiver receives signals from 3 or more of the GPS satellites, the GPS processor measures the time it takes for the signal to arrive from each of the satellites, does a calculation (triangulation) and then determines the position of the GPS receiver. The bus then (typically) sends this location data to some software, often located at a central dispatch center and the software calculates how long it will take the bus to arrive at the bus stop and sends this info to the display sign (or PDA or whatever). There is another wireless communications network involved between the bus and the location of software that calculates ETA.
Also, the technology in the bus is typically more than a GPS receiver. There are other devices providing location information such as a piezo gyro and an odometer sensor. This additional equipment is used when there is multipath (reflections) of the GPS signal.
[…] MTA, according to the report, views this as a cheaper alternative to the bus arrival boards currently in place at eight stops along 34th St. The MTA claims bringing that technology to bus […]