For travel innovators, timing is everything

Independent app and website developers are helping to shape how transport organisations deliver the same old product in a new way, writes JJ WORRALL

In the next few months, Transport for Ireland hopes to release one consolidated database of public transport information for third parties to harness

HOPING TO find the best way to work via public transport, he was presented with eight choices, none of which matched his usual route. With many of the choices actually recommending him to go beyond his final destination, he opted for his usual journey plan.

Dermot Daly is founder of Tapadoo, an app development company which has created the highly successful My Dublin Bus app for the iPhone. A simple application, it tells you when your next bus is due.

Most commuters with a smartphone have it or have downloaded a similar app at this stage. Even those without smartphones will be familiar with the real-time data displays at Dublin Bus stops, which do a similar job. Daly and others like him have realised that commuters want to be kept up to date with when to expect the next bus home.

“Dublin Bus has its own iPhone app,” says Daly. “But what I found was the Dublin Bus one was really full of stuff I didn’t need.” He adds that “great apps don’t do multiple things”.

The new National Transport Authority-sponsored Journey Planner service may have a hint of déjà vu for the capital's commuters, with many already utilising the similar HitTheRoad.iewhich maps the best public transport routes when getting from A to B in Dublin.

“We think it’s great that a nationwide planner is being launched, as it allows a wide range of operators to be featured,” says Ross Shannon, co-founder of Commutable, who produced the HitTheRoad site.

“As we’re focused on a smaller geographic area at the moment, we believe we still offer the best route-planning experience for Dublin’s transport system.”

Daly and Shannon, though, both give less than enthusiastic responses to the NTA’s nascent product. The former says “it’s okay”, while Shannon notes that “initial feedback is mixed”.

The website and Android app for the Journey Planner were launched last week, with the iPhone app arriving this week. After internal testing, the Planner was launched, according to NTA director of public transport services, Ann Graham, “with the intention of getting public feedback as soon as possible”.

While Graham admits the NTA has been monitoring complaints made on public forums, she encourages people to email the authority directly using a link on the official site. There are undoubtedly glitches, however, with Graham saying this usually revolves around place names.

Graham defends the Journey Planner, stating: “There’s little things that don’t seem to make sense to the individual but it’s generally that they haven’t set their settings in the correct way, so a lot of it is about the usage of the Journey Planner rather than the data itself.”

Aside from directions, though, there are other issues. For instance, a “link to” function on the site (allowing users to send a specific route to someone else via a link) continually failed to work when tested by The Irish Times.

Finola O’Driscoll, a project manager at the NTA, is also keen to defend the initiative, saying that while any service such as this will have “the odd glitch”, the process of covering the services of 120 rail, bus, ferry and tram operators (encompassing 9,600 bus stops, 750 different routes and 152 train stations across Ireland) in order to plan out any journey across the country using public transport was “hugely complex” in the first place.

The purpose of Journey Planner isn’t to wipe out the competition though. Rolled out by Transport for Ireland – the “single public transport brand” which the NTA developed to promote and integrate public transport provision in Ireland – it’s part of a larger process to become an “information integrator” that will help, rather than hinder, independent services such as HitTheRoad or My Dublin Bus.

O’Driscoll says that “in the next few months” Transport for Ireland hopes to release “one consolidated database” of public transport information for third parties to harness and produce app and web services, similar to the recent Dublinked dataset project.

Like many other parts of Transport for Ireland’s strategies, this is based on the “gold standard”, as O’Driscoll puts it, of Transport for London (TfL), the body which operates the entire transport system of the UK capital.

“We create application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can do exactly what we can do and create a whole bunch of great apps for customers on mobile devices, on tablets, on desktops, and we syndicate that for free,” says head of TfL online, Phil Young. After which it’s a case of “survival of the fittest”, with the best apps finding an audience and hundreds of others falling by the wayside.

For those not in the habit of using apps, the real-time information at bus stops in Dublin and Cork will be the most obvious step forward in making public travel easier to predict. While the Rebel County’s system is still in test mode, quarterly surveys in Dublin reveal a 93 per cent accuracy rating, with O’Driscoll proudly noting that “London are about 92 per cent and they’ve the most expensive system in the world”.

O’Driscoll’s colleague John O’Flynn is also keen to talk about the success of the Leap Card initiative, the reusable plastic smart card for Dublin commuters which is an integrated ticket for bus, rail, Dart and Luas services. O’Flynn reveals that “100,000 people” are now using the Leap Card in Dublin since it was launched in December last year.

Cards such as Leap have been commonplace in places like Hong Kong, Zurich and London for years though. Indeed, now that commuters are using their phone to check information on their next tram, metro, bus or ferry, why can’t the phone become a ticket itself? Young, O’Flynn and others all point towards the lack of near-field communication (NFC) devices as the main drawback here.

Ideally, NFC-enabled phones (which can carry payment information) would allow for contact-less payment as you wave your phone on your way into a metro station or at a Leap scanning point. The sticking point is infrastructure, as for the idea to work, not only does the commuter have to have an NFC-enabled device (at present the vast majority of smartphones don’t have this capability) but transport companies across the globe may have to invest in new physical systems to scan payments.

There is a growing willingness to make this infrastructure a reality though, with trials of NFC ticketing recently taking place in Boston, Milan, Malaga, Toronto and Cambridge, as well as across Germany and in several Chinese cities.

There are alternatives, though. In Copenhagen, for instance, customers have two ways of buying tickets with a smartphone. “First, you can buy a ticket by sending a text message,” says Ingrid Liboriussen, web editor and app developer at the city’s metro company Metroselskabet. Or alternatively, another app allows you to buy tickets via a credit card. The resulting text, email or app-based receipt from the company can be used as a ticket.

“We don’t have barriers, we just get on the trains, bus or metro and you show the driver or conductor your ticket on the phone,” says Liboriussen.

In London, Young reveals that by the end of 2012 customers will be able to use a “wave and pay card” as well as their “debit or credit card” to automatically pay their fare. “It’s about using what you’ve got in your wallet to gain access to travel,” he says.

As ever, when it comes to mobile developments, Apple’s plans are the ones to watch out for.

As Daly notes, “There are some interesting things happening in the iPhone world, in that Apple for the next version of iOS – which is about three months away – will include a function called Passbook, and Passbook is a centralised place for delivering tickets and coupons and the like to your iPhone. They’ve demoed it with plane tickets, so there’s no reason it couldn’t be done with bus tickets.”

WEB TRAFFIC WIFI ROLL-OUT FOR DUBLIN BUS ON THE HORIZON

DUBLIN BUS commuters can expect to find wifi services available on 90 of the company’s vehicles by the end of the year.

Following a 10-bus trial, which ran along the 16 route, Dublin Bus is purchasing 80 new wifi-enabled vehicles over the coming months.

The buses will be distributed all over the city on various different routes, with a member of the company’s engineering department revealing: “We’ve done some surveys, which compared the signal you would get if you were using a 3G dongle on a laptop during a bus journey compared to the signal you would get if you’re using our wifi, and there’s a much, much better signal.”

“Much better” translates as “being about 3MB or 4MB service pretty consistently”.

The wifi system revolves around a roof-mounted antenna and the overall project sees Dublin Bus following the lead of cities such as Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid, Beijing and Washington, who have all decided to give public transport commuters wifi access.

The buses equipped with wifi capability will all carry stickers informing customers of its availability.

Those logging in for the first time will have to “give a few small demographics like age, and how often they travel, and answer a few short questions” before giving their email address to sign up.