I’ve fantasized for years about engineering a network of self contained + solar powered microcontroller / camera units that I could place on top of bus stops to track them myself.
Then again, by the time I get around to it the official arrival times will likely have become more reliable.
Any rate, great write up- thanks for sharing!
Oh and if your public transit service has GTFS then just install home assistant and get maps and arrival times.
When Transit captures this information from their own users, it's much more trustable— basically all they'd have to watch for is someone maliciously poisoning the data by telling the app they're on a bus when they're really in a car, but that would be a lot of effort to go to just to be a jerk and end up shadowbanned.
However, I played around with one provider (Availtec's) estimations for Birmingham, AL's bus system.
This looked at the GPS position of the vehicle to see when they actually arrived at a stop and back compared it to the running estimation time. As we can see, it isn't great.
https://blog.line72.net/2019/08/06/validating-availtecs-bus-...
Of course sudden traffic, letting an elderly passenger get etc will mean that the countdown won't be the same to the second. But that's going to be the same if you used roadside cameras too.
Generally it should be seen as more of an estimate based on how long the last bus took to arrive from the same point rather than an exact prediction but it's usually useably accurate in my experience.
A lot of transportation services have tracking now.
You would have to replace the batteries fairly regularly and I have a feeling that without funding anything I cowboy rig would be super flaky.
2007 means that the network would probably have been an issue as well. Though, I’m less worried about that these days.
There are two types of RFID [active|passive] active required a battery which was rather small but the pings were so low power that the battery lasts a really long time.
We pivoted and built a tracking system for the cannabis industry - but cannabis growers didnt want to pay for anything they werent legally mandated to do so - we built a system called GreenScale which could track all employees in your growfields, bins etc... but again we are a bunch of engineers (my partner designs and builds the crazy sensors for TDK currently but designed the sensors for Google's RF hand sensors)
However, currently, we have a medical tracking system we have built for elderly care which integrates with Alexa and will tell you where your elderly care person is, if they accessed the restroom, if they fell... etc - but its based on a custom Ras PI basically and it uses RF as opposed to video etc with highly sensitive pressure sensors and other metrics to determine human action in a room....
When I was Director of OPs for Cognitive networks we buil spying bullshit on every single Vizio (and a couple other brands) TVs and could get a screenshot from any single TV connected to the internet...
We were always 5 years too early with our designs... and then all sorts of companies got founded upon things we were already doing 5 years prior... but people didnt undersrtand wtf we were trying to do and we are nerdy engineers and not salesmen so had a shitty time trying to get people to see our visions...
One of my partners now in eng manager at netflix instead.
For example, here in Prague, trams always arrives on time schedule or few minutes after that. (you can wait 2minutes lol)
Also all of our public transport has publicly accessible GPS tracking. Buses are more off of the time schedule, but you can check the GPS and compute the live time.
And subway doesn't make sense to track, since it arrives every few minutes at any station.
I don’t think this is very typical, but I have even had a bus driver stop mid route, say “this is as far as I’m going today”, kick everybody off, and drive away