MTA pilots GPS tracking on city buses
13 August, 2010
category: Contactless, Transit
New York’s MTA is piloting GPS tracking technology on city buses, allowing passengers to receive updates on their bus’ status via mobile phone or at the bus stop, according to nyunews.com.
The new system will get its data from passenger’s smart fare cards. Each time a user taps his or her smart card against a fare box, the time and location data of the transaction is sent to a central server, which uses the information to determine the position of the bus.
So far eight MTA bus routes have been outfitted with the new smart card system.
“The purpose of the pilot is to test the technology on several fronts, mainly interoperability and performance of equipment and software, cards and readers, and bus and subway in terms of availability, speed and processing/aggregation rules,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz told NYU News.
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