Nairobi city journey planner : an online and a mobile application

Public transport plays a vital role in enabling people to move from one place to another especially in urban areas. The provision of information related to public transportation enables travelers to pre-plan their journeys and even save time that would have been spent asking around or looking for this information from other sources. The city of Nairobi has a population of about four million people, most of whom rely on public transportation commonly known as matatus as the preferred mode of transport to work and to school. The public transport sector in Nairobi lacks proper management and organization. Currently, there exists no reliable source of public transport information that is easily accessible to public. This project aimed at developing a journey planner application: an online and a mobile application to assist travellers to preplan their journey by giving them a platform where matatu information and routes could be accessed. This information included bus information, route followed from origin to destination, trip duration, total trip distance and a route map. The application utilizes matatu routes data, Dijkstra routing algorithm, relational database and a Java ME mobile application. Both online and mobile application shares a common database and a routing algorithm hosted on a web server. After the application was developed, user tests were conducted. The users expressed the desire to enrich the application by adding more stations and more matatu routes as part of future improvement. The users regarded the application as a vital tool that makes their lives easy in commuting around the city.Popular science: Public transport plays an important role in enabling people to move from one place to another. The provision of information related to public transportation enables travelers to pre-plan their journeys and even save time that would have been spent asking around or looking for this information from other sources. The city of Nairobi has a population of about four million people, most of whom rely on public transportation commonly known as matatus as the main mode of transport. The public transport sector in Nairobi lacks proper management and organization. Currently, there exists no reliable source of public transport information. This research project aimed at developing both a mobile and an online journey planner application to assist travellers to preplan their journeys by giving them a platform where matatu information and routes could be accessed. This information includes bus information, route followed from origin to destination, trip duration, total trip distance and a route map. The application utilizes matatu routes data, a routing algorithm and database in its development. The online version was developed as a website whereas the mobile one was developed as a downloadable and installable application targeting low end phones which make the greatest share in the Kenyan mobile market. After the application was developed, user tests were conducted. Surprisingly, about 65% of the users preferred the mobile to the online application since mobile phones are more affordable than computers in Kenya. The users regarded the application as a vital tool in journey planning and also expressed the desire to enrich the application by extending it to cover the whole of the city. Moreover, the users recommended further developments in design and also to include information e.g. where to change bus and to make the application to be more concise as well as easy to use