1 Mar 2010
Public Transit Aficianados
I live in San Francisco, which is not known for the efficiency of its public transportation system. Every deficiency can be looked at as an opportunity, though, which explains the plethora of apps that enable me to find real-time information about transit lines from my smartphone.
They do pretty well; in most cases, GPS is leveraged to find nearby stops. They take advantage of the native interface to mobile phones so I am not pecking at tiny hyperlinks that were meant for a big display at home.
Although, having to choose a route manually from all possible routes seems like an extra step, since, with location information, you can find nearby routes as well.
One thing I haven’t seen tackled yet is personalization; if I look up the next time the 1BX express bus is coming by my house every morning at 7:15 AM, the app could learn this and (assuming a mobile platform that supported background apps) prefetch the information for me at 7:14 AM.
It could also detect what “home” means to me, or let me enter it manually, and when I’m in a strange location, “guess” that I’m trying to get home and preplan routes with real-time arrival information. Furthermore, it could keep a database of common places I go to, indexed by my current position and the current time of day, and prefetch routes based on my habits. E.g. if I’m at home, I generally go to work at 7:15 AM; if I’m at work and it’s 7 PM, I’m probably heading to a happy hour, dinner, or back home.
The app shouldn’t worry about being wrong if, in fact, I’m not trying to head home; I’ll forgive it for trying :-)
