CrowdMap

Bus transports in the cities of many developing countries are marred with severe problems, like information unavailability, bad road and bus conditions, lack of proper scheduling and timing, and so on. An information service can become extremely handy for the travelers in countries with emerging economy, where public traffic systems are generally riddled with uncertainty. However, the penetration of smart-phones in everyday life could be exploited to find possible solutions. We have developed CrowdMap an intelligent data logging module for smart-phones and a server side processing mechanism to extract road and bus route information, and to annotate them over the city map.

An Online Survey

We conducted an online survey comprising of 150 partcipants across 15 cities of India to investigate the possible concerns of commuters. We observe that road features such as speed breakers, potholes and bad road patches can potentially affect comfort of commuters (a). Additionally, we find that most of the commuters are particularly concerned about the comfort level offered by the bus during travel (b). This includes jerkiness, overcrowding, heat as well the dependability of the bus (c)

Essentially, real time commute information may facilitate the commuter in route selection, on the fly, based on the comfort level and travel time. Notably, the immediate best solution of Google Transit are mostly unavailable in cities of developing countries. As an example, it is available for only 13 cities in India.