City to retrofit buses with GPS tracking

Commuting through the city may soon be a little less hectic with the help of a new program under development by the MTA that will provide tracking information for buses to passengers via GPS.

According to the MTA, the system is designed to eventually allow passengers to receive updates about their bus' status, either on their cell phones or at their bus stops.

The public information system will get its data from another recent MTA project, Smart Cards — computer-embedded fare cards that allow passengers to tap rather than swipe to pay for transit. Each tap will be registered in a central server and will be used to determine the position of a given bus.

The project, however, is still in its early test phases and so far only eight MTA bus routes have been outfitted with the new Smart Card system.

MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said, "The purpose of the pilot is to test the technology on several fronts, mainly interoperability and performance of equipment and software, cards and readers, and bus and subway in terms of availability, speed and processing/aggregation rules."

He added: "We are commissioning a server which receives relatively raw location and other data from the bus, integrates it with route and schedule data, and provides the results."

While this may eventually mean riders will have access to the location of their bus, they won't have access to arrival times.

According to Ortiz, traffic and other factors makes estimating arrival times difficult. He said tall buildings can also prevent satellites from receiving the information to make accurate predictions, which pose additional problems.

Northern California's public transportation system faced similar challenges when it began GPS-tracking system integration in 1998.

According to Christopher Peeples, director at large of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District, the GPS system was difficult to manage and some buses would simply never arrive at their locations.

Lawrence Rosenshein, vice president of sales, marketing and business development of NextBus, the company that installed the GPS systems in the AC Transit lines, said a patented algorithm is required to calculate the location of the buses before the information is relayed to the public.

"Once we run our system, we create a historical archive of data of bus travel time," he said. "We use historical data to inform our predictions."

Taking this into account, the MTA has hired OpenPlans, under a $265,000 contract, to create a system similar to the one used by NextBus.

Feiye Wang is a deputy city/state editor. E-mail her at fwang@nyunews.com.