Initiative taken to track real time location of buses using Google Maps

Kolkata: West Bengal Transport Corporation (WBTC), in association with Google Maps, is coming up with a mechanism to track real time location of buses.

The initiative will help the bus commuters to see live location of buses and plan their journey.

The commuters will just need to type, "Bus Between" and write the names of bus stands. Then he or she will get the timings and tariff of the buses between the routes.

"This real time tracking will help anyone using the public transportation in the city. Running solely on GPS earlier from a few years, now the system is transitioning to ETM (electronic ticket machines) backed that will have dual purpose - help in tracking buses and also monitor the ticketing," said Rajanvir Singh Kapur, managing director of WBTC.

Representing the Google association, Head of Data Products from Lepton,

Vijay Kumar Dhatwalia said: "This would also promote the WBTC services and revenue enhancement owing to live visibility of buses and increase usage of public transport."

WBTC, in association with Google, had launched its Real time Bus Transit services in 2017 for the commuters on Google Maps.

The Google Maps helps the city commuters to know the Real time location of the buses and plan their journey accordingly.

Location of buses was earlier tracked from GPS devices installed in the buses however the delay responses and failure of devices were a bottleneck.

To overcome the concerns of the GPS devices in receiving precise locations from the buses, WBTC is taking initiative to implement ETM in all the buses.

According to the officials in the department, the ETM machines would provide exact live location along with real time ticket management for the same.

The officials in the department, further, added that The transition is taking place and the full routes Real time information will be available from Mid-May.