Integrating Real-time Bus-Tracking with Pedestrian Navigation in a Journey Planning System

Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) systems provide real-time location information for emergency response, delivery services and freight transport. The advent of AVL systems has meant both public and private bus operators can implement systems to provide real-time passenger information, analyse their service performance and also to evaluate the quality of their operations. Traffic congestion, intersection delays, weather and operational conditions are some of the factors that make it difficult to predict the accurate bus arrival time in a real-time environment. In a joint project between NUI Maynooth and Blackpool Transport, a dynamic web application was developed to display and update vehicle locations (bustracking.co.uk) (Winstanley et al. 2009) and to provide predictive bus arrival times at stops. A journey by bus is usually part of a longer door-to-door itinerary, usually involving walking before, after or between bus segments. The passenger is really interested in door-to-door journey times when making decisions about time of departure and which bus to catch. Therefore journey planners that combine the pedestrian and bus journeys are required and indeed several such systems exist, such as Transport Direct (2009), Traveline Midlands (2009), Google transit (2009). However these systems are mainly designed to plan journeys in advance and so base their decisions on the fixed bus timetable. For last-minute planning, and also for updating journey plans as-you-go, real-time bus locations and short-term predictions of bus arrival times at stops can be used to give more reliable journey times taking into account delays due to congestion, diversions and other factors. This paper describes an experimental system that combines bus tracking and pedestrian navigation