translink bus schedules on your phone

The year was 1999. It had been a year since Karo and OpenRoad collaborated on launching the first BC Transit website with searchable bus schedules. The website we created had gained a ton of users instantly. Call centre volumes hadn't gone down, but web traffic was through the roof for BC Transit. The website won a Canadian Urban Transit Association award. It also wound up being referenced in Patricia Seybold's book, @Customers.com as excellence in customer service online. We were proud of our work and happy to know that BC Transit was providing customers with something they wanted, the answer to the question: "when is the next bus coming?"

It was around that time that the first Nokia WAP toolkit was available for download. The headlong charge into mobile was just around the corner and it looked just like the past. Text-based, menu driven, it was a return to the Gopher interfaces that I'd first cut my digital teeth on at SFU, working as a research assistant and mucking about on large Unix servers.



One day at the office, I asked a developer if he could create a really basic ASP page or two that allowed me to implement the design I'd mocked up for browsing bus schedules on a mobile phone using WAP. We had the dev database in our office and knew the secret ingredient to programming a very simple bus-stop mobile application: the stop ID. Every bus stop in the transit database has a unique identifier. If you know that, you can query the database on what bus comes past that stop. You can then select that bus, combine it with the current time, and show the next time that bus is supposed to come by.

Sound simple? It was. In less than 2 or 3 days of mucking about in our spare time, we had a working prototype that would tell you, from your WAP-enabled mobile phone, when the next bus arrived.

I demo'd the application at BC Transit, which may have become Translink by that point in its history. They were pleasant and polite, but didn't seem to grasp why people would want bus schedules on their phones. And of course, mobile web browsers on your phone were still a few months, if not years away. Bryan had one - his Qualcomm that he used at Telus was pretty shit-hot and bleeding edge. MyBC was getting into providing mobile content and everyone knows the two killer apps for mobile are a) when is the next bus coming (Translink) and b) movie schedules (MyBC)... what else do you need?

All quite funny now looking back at it, with our Symbian, Windows Mobile, and RIM devices, which I'm sure will be eclipsed by whatever crazy devices we'll have in another 7 years from now.

Anyhow. I've always had a pet peeve that this great and blindingly simple idea (tell people when the next bus is coming -- or a rough approximation -- on their mobile phone) had never happened. And as more and more phones came onto the market and adoption soared, I become increasingly annoyed it had never happened.

Fast forward to November 2006. I'm sharing a beer with a group of "innovators" at Steamworks, part of an informal Vancouver get together on a very snowy night. I meet two charming and enthusiastic kids from SFU comp sci, who like me are carrying around an over-powered Nokia N-Series phone which probably costs them way too much to operate to their fullest potential (especially on a student budget). We get talking, killer mobile apps, bus schedules come up, I rant about the lack of mobile Translink schedules, how easy it was to implement, how come it doesn't exist, etc.

I then try to head back home in the middle of a snow storm and get stuck for 2 hrs trying to catch a bus. Of which I took a photo of with my N70... Of course, my bright idea would have been SOL on a night like that, when you were lucky to catch any bus, let alone one on schedule. But I digress.



I bump into these guys again in a few places, then I read my old boss Barry Shell's article about them in the latest SFU Faculty of Applied Science newsletter. Then, today, I get home, tired from having waited at the bus stop for longer than I should have (or what seemed to be a long time, because I really didn't know when the next 22 was coming), I flip open the Vancouver Sun and what do I see?



Guess who's just come up with an SMS bus schedule screenscraper system for SFU students?

Well done gents. It's about bloody time. I should have done it myself.

Perhaps my formal corporate way of asking Translink to engage in a system like that was not the way to go about doing it (it was their data after all). Perhaps we simply should have written it, stickered every stop in Vancouver, and done it guerrilla-style.

So combine John and Igor's efforts with the recent failure of "electronic bus-stops" powered by GPS systems on buses (courtesy of Siemens and part of a $30 million project) and I hope that someone at Translink finally pays some attention to this basic need that could be implemented at such a low cost with such simple technology, most of which already exists today.

Always one to think ahead, I was thinking for the 2007 version of the 2000 WAP-app, you could use QR-coded bus-stops -- my N70 has the Kaywa reader on it, a nifty app that turns your cameraphone into a bar-code reader. Simply point, scan, and it does the rest, sending an SMS or launching a web link to retrieve the schedule information. No GPS, no huge infrastructure from Siemens required. Again, all using technology that exists today.



Here's to user-powered innovation.