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TRANSACTIONS NEWSLETTER ONLINE
May/June 1999: TransLink®

Electronic sign giving bus information

A NextBus sign inside a Muni shelter shows
predicted arrival times for the next two buses.

Photo: San Francisco Examiner/Kim Komenich

It's 8 a.m. -- Do You Know Where Your Bus Is?

Waiting for the bus has just gotten a little less frustrating for some San Francisco Muni riders. Starting in early June, Muni began evaluating a satellite-based system that keeps track of buses on the 22-Fillmore route as they wend their way across the city, and sends electronic messages to bus shelter signs along the way to let riders know when the next bus is actually going to show up.

In explaining why the 22-Fillmore route was picked for inaugurating the high-tech system, Muni's general manager, Michael Burns, was quoted in the media as saying, "This line was...selected as the most unreliable. If [the system] works here, it can work anywhere."

Developed by an Emeryville company called, appropriately, NextBus(TM) Information Systems, LLC, the NextBus system combines travel time data -- collected over a number of months -- with real-time information from an automatic vehicle location system (AVL) to predict how long it will take a transit vehicle to get from point A to point B at different hours of the day, on various days of the week and under diverse traffic conditions.

Before offering a three-month free trial of the system to San Francisco Muni, NextBus had tested the product in a smaller market -- the six-vehicle Emery-Go-Round shuttle in the company's home town. Following months of data collection, NextBus made its public debut in Emeryville in November 1998.

In Emeryville, electronic signs were placed in five office buildings, one bus shelter and on a bus-stop pole. In San Francisco, the NextBus vehicle-tracking equipment has been installed on 35 electric trolley buses on the 22-Fillmore route, and 10 electronic bus shelter signs have been placed at major stops (more signs may be added later).

Transit riders in Emeryville and San Francisco also can log on to the Web to check whether they have time to finish one more task before catching their bus. "It helps people be more efficient in the use of their time," noted Wendy Silvani, director of the Emeryville Transportation Management Association, which operates the Emery-Go-Round.

San Francisco is considering whether to purchase the NextBus technology, and, potentially, expand it to other routes. In order for NextBus to be applied to a larger fleet of vehicles, Muni would need a city-wide AVL system to provide the data on which bus arrival predictions are based. Transit agencies with relatively small fleets can use the lower cost NextBus-developed AVL system.

Several Bay Area transit operators, both large and small, either already have installed, are currently installing or are seriously looking at acquiring AVL technology, primarily for fleet-monitoring purposes. "Once they have AVL -- whether it's NextBus or not -- the passenger information element is a fairly inexpensive and easy add-on," commented Leon Baumgarten, the company's California sales manager.

-- Reka Goode

You can find NextBus on the Web at www.nextbus.com.

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