Carnegie Mellon Develops iPhone App That Predicts When Bus Will Arrive
From: Carnegie Mellon News (PA) - 07/27/2011
By: Byron Spice 

Carnegie Mellon University researchers in the Rehabilitation Engineering
Research Center on Accessible Public Transportation (RERC-APT) have developed
Tiramisu, an iPhone application that uses crowdsourcing to enable riders to
know when the next bus will arrive. Tiramisu displays the nearest stops, a
list of buses and light rail vehicles that are scheduled to arrive, the
estimated arrival times, and the level of fullness, as indicated by the
riders already on the vehicle. The system also helps riders with disabilities
by indicating if there is room on the bus for a wheelchair. In testing, the
RERC-APT team found that even a small number of riders can provide useful
information about the buses, and the information becomes more useful as more
riders access the system. Tiramisu is one of the initial projects developed
as part of the Traffic21 initiative created by Carnegie Mellon and the
Hillman Foundation. "Crowdsourcing makes it possible for riders to provide
real-time updates about how the bus system is actually functioning on any
given day by simply sharing information with each other," says Traffic21
director Rick Stafford. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2011/july/july27_patiphoneapp.html

Links:
Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Accessible Public Transportation
http://www.rercapt.org/

Tiramisu from AppStore
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tiramisu/id429707931

Aaron Steinfeld
http://www.rercapt.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=52&Itemid=57

Field Trial of Tiramisu: Crowd-Sourcing Bus Arrival Times to Spur Co-Design
http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1979187&ftid=963766&dwn=1&CFID=33791488&CFTOKEN=74138771

Traffic21
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/traffic21/index.aspx