Crowdsourcing Delay Information

Not every public transport agency publishes real-time delay information, and some do not even have it. Some of the proprietary transit apps have used user-submitted data to bridge this gap for some time now.

This talk explores how we can do the same in open-source apps, based on Transitous. It covers the steps from collecting the vehicle positions from people's phones in an ethical way, to deriving the delay and to integrating the results with existing routing services and apps.

In addition to allowing for the independent collection of real-time information, the components written for this project (gps-collector and gtfs-delay-tracker) could potentially be useful for community buses, heritage railways and smaller public transport agencies with limited budgets.