BALTIMORE TRANSIT 2.0

If you’ve ever taken a bus, you know just how fun it is to be stuck outside in the cold wondering when the next one will come. That’s why the state of Maryland spent $2.7 million dollars developing a real-time bus tracking system for Baltimore, so that riders would finally be able to overcome the city’s “notoriously unpredictable” bus service.

The state’s approach made sense for the most part:

Due to budget constraints, the Maryland Transportation Authority (MTA) couldn’t afford to deck out their buses with fancy new tech. So instead, they retrofitted their buses’ 25-year-old tracking system with an “interim solution” for real-time passenger information.

The buses rely on old GPS and radio signals to report location data. The system is primitive, and as such, the data can be somewhat unreliable.

Still, it’s an improvement.

Spirit of the ‘70s: an old MTA bus kicking it at Howard and Centre.

While the MTA had provided commuters with a nominal bus tracker, it didn’t take the next step: unlike the real-time information generated by most other large transit systems, Baltimore’s data wasn’t made available in a developer-friendly format.

This means that Baltimore’s real-time tracking data isn’t compatible with the most popular commuter apps, like Google Maps or Transit App (our pride and joy).

With Baltimore’s data bungled up in a format no-one else can use, consumers are forced to use the MTA’s proprietary web interface to access the data.

We’re not gonna mince words. It ain’t pretty.

The project—delayed for years, and with millions of dollars behind it—is treating its users to an interface that looks like it was ripped from a 1996 GeoCities template.

In the time it would take you to wrangle out real-time bus predictions from their website, it’s quite possible that your bus would have already whizzed by!