Starbus

2008-01-01

A marshrutka minibus running a route in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Starbus (*bus) was a project to design and prototype an information system to provide arrival time updates for public transportation in settings with highly distributed public transit systems. In settings like, Kyrgyzstan, buses follow routes designed by a central authority, but are privately owned and operated. This means that there is little guarantee of arrival times, making it challenging for riders to use the transit system. These challenges are compounded by the relative lack of data and GPS services, which makes it expensive to instrument buses with location tracking and for users to define their own locations to estimate arrivals.

Starbus addresses these challenges by building a bus-tracking device using only GPS and SMS features, and relying on the locational sensing of buses to enable users to define important locations. This work contributes towards building transportation information systems in constrained contexts and may be relevant for other applications, such as crowd-sourced mapping.

Anthony Poon

Senior Technical Advisor

ICTD and technology for socialization, practitioners, and peer support.

Publications

Experiences with a Transportation Information System that Uses Only GPS and SMS

We present an SMS-based system for providing transit information based solely on existing cellular and GPS networks. We developed and applied our system to privately-run marshrutka buses in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. However, our goal is to more broadly address issues of ad-hoc shared transportation systems in the developing world. A custom designed GPS-GSM unit is placed on a vehicle, and users can query our server over SMS with their own non-GPS-enabled cell phones. We report on the accuracy of our location naming approach and summarize interviews with bus drivers and bus riders relating their views of the system.

Ruth E. Anderson, Waylon Brunette, Erica Johnson, Caitlin Lustig, Anthony Poon, Cynthia Putnam, Odina Salihbaeva, Beth E. Kolko, Gaetano Borriello

PDF Project DOI

Experiences with a Transportation Information System that Uses Only GPS and SMS

Building a Transportation Information System Using Only GPS and Basic SMS Infrastructure

This work consists of two main components: (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrates the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information infrastructure using only GPS and SMS. Transportation is a very important shared resource; enabling efficient and effective use of such resources aids overall development goals.

Ruth E. Anderson, Anthony Poon, Caitlin Lustig, Waylon Brunette, Gaetano Borriello, Beth E. Kolko

PDF Project Poster DOI

Building a Transportation Information System Using Only GPS and Basic SMS Infrastructure

MySMS: Connecting Developing Regions though SMS

Short message service (SMS) is cell phone technology that is a simple and flexible transport mechanism for programmatic information exchange in developing regions for database-based applications. MySMS takes advantage of this medium by providing a framework using SMS as a transport layer to allow SQL queries, notifications, remote code execution and rapid application development.

Brad Campbell, Ruibo Li, Anthony Poon, David St. Hilaire

PDF Code Project