The MTA, is set to pour millions of dollars into a high-tech project that will give New Yorkers a real-time view into the exact location of every bus in the city.
Today, the MTA announced that this project will immediately go live in the borough of Staten Island — which has buses and a light rail line but no subway — and will be in all five boroughs by 2013. BusTime data will be available through an API, a web dashboard, via SMS and by using QR codes.
“Real-time changes everything in the best way for a consumer,” said Dylan Goelz, who heads up marketing at Roadify, a company and app building a sort of crowdsourced, API-backed guide to transit and trip planning. “The main reason people don’t ride the bus is either because they don’t know where it goes or more often than not they don’t know when it comes. And the MTA isn’t necessarily at fault all the time … but as a bus rider it’s pretty incredible to know exactly when and where the bus is.”
Finally, The MTA is catching up to the times.