CHENNAI: Good news for MTC commuters. By the beginning of 2019, the bus travellers in Chennai will get an app which will track the bus they want to board and tell them the time it will reach the bus stop.
The Institute of Road Transport (IRT) and the State Transport Department are helping the MTC develop a mobile application - Locate and Access my Bus (LAMB) and a dedicated website to help commuters in the state which will show the position of their bus in real-time.
Official sources said teams from state transport undertakings have already coded the geo position of all the nearly 1,50,000 bus stops across Tamil Nadu. These are currently serviced by 22,000 buses across the State. This will serve as the backbone of the application to be built for commuters.
Tracking the live position of the bus across the state, seeing the schedule of various buses of any bus station, searching specific bus routes operated by the various STU’s, seeing the estimated time of arrival of any bus to the accuracy level of less than a minute are some of the key uses of this mobile app.
The user will be able to plan the entire journey from door to door (i.e the directions will include the walking distance between the residence and the nearest stop). The system will present both fastest and cheapest option depending on the parameters chosen by the commuter.
The application will be common for the entire Tamil Nadu, but loaded on the map section based on the geography of the user like many other Location Based Apps like Swiggy and Ola. The App and Website will be bilingual (both Tamil and English). In view of the safety of the users, an SOS panel will be embedded in the App so that the user can alert his / her position to predefined contacts in case of emergency.
All the above will help transport department and State transport corporations to perform better route rationalisation and plan the bus network better aligned to the changing needs of citizens. This data will also help STUs to visualise their operations and optimise their schedules to reduce bus bunching and increase occupancy ratio.