Real time transit information is something that is a natural for the mobile web. It’s huge in Japan where it’s often combined with QR Codes for almost instant access. Check out the graphic below from Forrester Research<\/a> via ZD Net’s Russell Shaw<\/a> to see how it works.<\/p>\n
Here in the West, using 2D codes for this purpose is in it’s infancy. There’s a pilot project in Paris<\/a> but widespread adoption seems years away. The big thing holding back the use 2D codes on mobile phones is the number of competing incompatible code formats. There are a couple of open, royalty free formats; QR Code and Data Matrix, plus a bunch of proprietary ones like Shotcode, ezCode, Colorcode, BeeTag, Smartpox and Qode. Users won’t install a half a dozen different readers on their phones. And until a single format has a dominant market share, phone manufacturers won’t make a reader application a standard feature on all phones and transit operators won’t invest in the systems and signage needed to make it work.<\/p>\n
To use the service, called iBus, you just enter the 4 digit stop number and the one to three digit line number into a couple of text boxes at tmb.net\/ibus.wml<\/a> (wml) or tmb.net\/ibus.html<\/a> (cHtml). The wml site is actually
easier to use because it sets your browser’s input mode to numeric, saving at least a couple key taps.<\/p>\n
iBus uses GPS technology to track where the next bus is and estimate arrival. It should be accurate but it let me down the two times I tried using it. In both cases it claimed that the next bus would arrive in 20 minutes. The first time I decided I didn’t want to wait 20 minutes and started walking only to have the bus pass me less than 5 minutes later! The next time I waited and again the bus arrived within a few minutes. I’m not sure why this happens – perhaps the buses that arrived had broken GPS units and couldn’t be tracked. I frequently use the NextBus system in San Francisco (see my review<\/a> of Nextbus and three other transit trackers ) in San Francisco and find it infallibly accurate. But NextBus’ user interface, although recently improved, is still much more cumbersome and time-consuming to use than iBus’s simple numeric interface.<\/p>\n
Real time transit information is something that is a natural for the mobile web. It’s huge in Japan where it’s often combined with QR Codes for almost instant access. Check out the graphic below from Forrester Research via ZD Net’s Russell Shaw to see how it works. Here in the West, using 2D codes for this purpose is in it’s infancy. There’s a pilot project in Paris but widespread adoption seems years away. The big thing holding back the use … Continue reading