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Sankranti Proposal
Every rapidly urbanising city in India today faces a crisis of sustainable mobility. No Indian city is more famous for – and dependent on – its public transportation than Mumbai. Unlike its neglected and overburdened suburban railways, the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply & Transport (BEST), the oldest and largest bus company in the country, is one of the few civic agencies in India which has kept up with the rapid pace of urban expansion. Serving around 40 lakh commuters and covering 7 lakh kilometres every day, the ubiquitous red buses of the BEST are one of the city’s most-loved icons.
Our challenge is defined by a simple question faced by every commuter on an almost daily basis – which bus goes to my destination? The BEST is a vast city-wide-web connecting millions of commuters every day, with cheap, efficient and mostly reliable services throughout Greater Mumbai. But the BEST’s “hardware” of buses, routes and stops is vastly superior to its “software” for communicating and interacting with its commuters. Basic information about routes, schedules, and stops is scarce or unavailable in public spaces. Physical stops only indicate their name and routes served – unless one is at a junction or depot where some signs are posted. The BEST’s “hardware-centric” approach forces urban commuters to adopt a rural mentality, sharing information by word-of-mouth. Regular commuters memorise a handful of routes to common destinations. But for indirect or unfamiliar routing, commuters must rely on the advice of strangers, or improvisation and guesswork.
The public is literally left to their own devices, making split-second transport decisions stressful and wasting valuable time. Travelling by rickshaws or taxis costs five to ten times more than an average bus fare. Those who can’t afford to pay this premium must simply wait and watch, in ignorance of when the next bus will arrive (if ever). Impatience and lack of information widen a social divide where the rich can bypass the system by congesting and polluting the roads with cars, and the poor pay the price of increased traffic. The stress of road travel frequently erupts in widespread rage against the whole network, and aggression against imagined enemies of mobility. In Mumbai this crisis has recently inspired anti-poor media campaigns to boycott rickshaws and taxis which refuse to ply to the exact destinations demanded by impatient commuters. Positive efforts to democratise mobility are so far absent, and the use of “smart” technologies to improve commuting is in an early stage in urban India.
Partial fixes can now be found in mobile “smartphones” which allow custom application programming. There are now many useful “apps” for accessing transport information in Mumbai, including rail timetables, bus routes, and taxi and rickshaw fare calculators. The growing popularity of these apps is encouraging, but also shows that public infrastructure cannot be run on proprietary software, or cater solely to elite smartphone users. Diverse transit apps are available from various vendors for different handsets and mobile platforms. These are all built without common standards or open source software code, which allow users and programmers to incorporate frequent schedule and route changes by BEST, or updates and improvements to features and usability. These applications remain out of the reach of the average commuter who does not have a smartphone or data plan, or the know-how to install custom apps.
BEST’s own efforts to harness technologies have, until recently, been ill-conceived. Smartcard systems which required swiping at entries and exits failed due to overcrowding, technical glitches, and because the system bypassed the bus conductors, who play multiple roles as ticket agent, crowd manager and guide to lost commuters. Another questionable investment are the “BEST-TV” LCD panels now installed in the majority of buses, broadcasting local advertising and entertainment to a captive audience of commuters. Celebrity gossip, local advertising, poorly produced documentaries, and reruns of old serials are repeated in an endless loop. Many BEST-TV screens have been vandalised, or their speakers deliberately disabled by commuters or conductors annoyed by the noise.
Buses remain a vital part of any urban transport network, and are today more important than ever, as Indian cities expand rapidly along new highway and road corridors. The dizzying expansion of private vehicles in urban India, and state agencies’ obsession with building fly-overs and bridges in the name of “decongestion” only generates more traffic and pollution, further degrading public space and reducing mobility for all citizens. Pro-car policies have skewed public investment priorities. Where new transit systems are planned, they are in capital-intensive metro and mono-rails which selectively link or bypass existing networks, rather than regenerating or enhancing existing infrastructure. Our challenge is to develop low-cost, innovative solutions to this crisis. In this effort, everyone who uses the public space of streets and roads, whether rich or poor, is a stakeholder.
Our project proposes to radically “upgrade” the “software” for commuting by BEST buses in Mumbai. We will focus on the mundane, everyday aspects of daily commuting, providing solutions that work on existing devices and use open standards, rather than creating new or closed systems.
“Smart” technologies can never override or replace human intelligence, especially in Indian cities where access to information and mobility is growing more unequal and contested every day. Transport networks are more than the sum of their hardware, and our project aims at building on the “soft” dimensions of urban infrastructure – the kindness of strangers, solidarity of commuters, and the pleasures of public transit. Bus routes are also social networks, bus stops are public spaces, and the mass of commuters are a community of citizens. Technology is only a means to empower their collective intelligence to transform the culture of mobility in Mumbai and urban India.
Our project will be developed over phases which creatively explore the technological, social and symbolic-linguistic dimensions of public transportation infrastructure in Mumbai. We plan to develop free and open source SMS and mobile applications, a multi-lingual web database open and editable by the public, and visual and print media in Mumbai’s many languages – making it simple, fun and “cool” to take the bus. Our inter-disciplinary and collaborative approach embraces three stages of iterative development:
- Development of mobile applications for delivering bus schedules, stops and routing information via SMS, web, and smartphones using free and open source software, a computer server and modem connected to the internet, and the full database of routes, schedules and stops provided by BEST;
- Web-based services and a live online database to be enriched by beta testers riding buses, who will “crowd-source” data from the public about local landmarks, services and localities, and build communities through linked web pages and live feeds for every individual route and stop in Greater Mumbai;
- Public media strategies to re-imagine the BEST network as public space with creatively designed, multi-lingual stickers, placards, and maps on stops and inside buses, and through word-of-mouth marketing and social networking with schools, shops, and communities near bus stops and depots.
Our solution to fragmented handset platforms and the smartphone market is to develop a suite of open source applications for all classes of mobile device users, both with and without data connections, and both regular phones and advanced smartphones. This broad approach is meant to reach a wide spectrum of commuters across the social and digital divide. Our most significant work so far has been the development of a prototype ChaloBEST service using SMS text messaging – a universal feature common to all devices and networks, and which can provide split-second routing, scheduling and other bus information in 160 characters or less.
Mumbai’s cosmopolitan diversity, high literacy and mobile penetration levels present a perfect testing ground for the widespread use of SMS as a mass communications technology. The use of pidgin English and romanised Hindi and Marathi SMS has become common with the spread of mobile telephony, and SMS is emerging as a new lingua franca of urban India. Using the open source application framework RapidSMS, the full database of routes, schedules and stops provided by BEST, and a GSM modem connected to an internet server, we have successfully built and tested our SMS service for basic queries of bus numbers, stops, and routing between areas and stops. The system is built on hardware and software cheaply available anywhere in India – a postpaid SIM card with a monthly unlimited SMS plan, installed in a GSM modem connected to a Linux server running RapidSMS. Queries can be sent by SMS to +91.96195.24420 preceded with “bus”, “stop”, or “from” and “to”. Instructions for using the service, and a log of all incoming and outgoing messages are at http://sms.chalobest.in
We have also developed a web application that works across almost all browsers, both on desktop computers and smartphones, using the html5 standard. This app is also location-aware, so when it launches it requests the user’s current position and automatically suggests nearby BEST stops and routes available. For this web app, the database is augmented with spatial coordinates which are merged with the official database provided by BEST (see next phase below). It has been designed with extensive feedback and bug reports on usability and accuracy, and the source code is published online for others to study and improve. This web application can be accessed from a desktop computer or data-enabled smartphone at http://m.chalobest.in
We are also at work on developing an native smartphone application on for the open-source mobile operating system Android, which works across numerous manufacturers’ smartphones and tablet devices. This application is in its early stages of design, development and testing. It includes all of the features of the web application, additional search and browsing options, and maps of routes and stops in Mumbai, powered by the OpenStreetMap project which (unlike Google Maps) allows users to edit and add to the underlying base map.
All our work on these mobile applications is distributed as free and open source software, so other other groups of students, programmers and users may run, study, modify and reproduce the technology for other bus networks and in other cities across India. Documentation of our hardware and software, database, and application design is regularly maintained and updated on the MetaStudio wiki at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education http://wiki.chalobest.in
Any ride on BEST is a journey through the history and geography of Greater Mumbai. The most fascinating part of our work since March far has been the complex semantics through which streets, places and landmarks in the city are identified and named. Almost all places in Mumbai have two, three or more names – a colloquial name (“Dhobi Talao”), a nearby landmark (“Metro Cinema”), and an official name (“Basudev Balwant Phadke Chowk”). Though the BEST’s database uses mostly official names, there are thousands more common and colloquial names which we plan to collect, to improve ChaloBEST and tune our apps and services to Mumbai’s linguistic and toponymic diversity. This required us to re-design the BEST database to augment it with names, landmarks, and places which are left out of their official schema of stops and areas in Greater Mumbai.
Additionally, we have transliterated the 2,500 unique stop names and 800 unique area names used by the BEST into Marathi, to enable bilingual development of our mobile and web application. Lastly, we have begun collecting the precise latitude-longitude coordinates for every bus stop throughout Mumbai using hand-held GPS devices, a task which is more than half-completed by our project team. This spatial data is used to determine the user’s current location and show maps of stops and routes in our web and Android apps. The fully geo-referenced database will enable integration with mapping services such as Google Maps/Earth, OpenStreetMap and GIS software packages.
Our aim in this second phase is to open up this process of annotating and augmenting the BEST’s official database through a public website and live database, with an individual web page for every bus stop and every route number served by the BEST. These pages will be virtual counterparts to physical stops and buses, and provide a “crowd-sourcing” platform for beta testers to contribute place names, information on nearby landmarks and places, spatial coordinates, and a leave comments on stops and routes. Information posted to these pages will be made available through live web feeds for each stop and route, and the pages will syndicate comments, links and posts from blogs, web media, and mentions on social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook.
In this phase, we aim to recruit around fifty beta testers to field test the web services, and spread use of the website and services through blogs, social networks, and word of mouth. User-contributed data uploaded on the web will be updated live in our database, enhancing the accuracy and usability of our SMS, web and Android applications through “crowd-sourced” local information. We aim to use the these networked pages and services as tools for organising communities at stops and on the bus, working first with beta testers at selected stops and routes and subsequently launching a public beta tester programme over the web. In this phase, we hope to integrate commuters as agents of feedback and change into a wider information ecology linking our mobile applications and web services with the public spaces and social networks of the BEST.
The third and final phase of our project is aimed at transforming the culture of mobility in Mumbai, using the mobile and web technologies developed in prior phases as a means to this end. Through this public media campaign, we hope to recruit hundreds more users of ChaloBEST through open registration on our website, and leverage this social network to harvest more user contributions to and participation in our apps and services.
We will publicly launch ChaloBEST using creatively designed print media in English, Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi which contains links to our website and applications, as well as short and simple instructions in these languages on how to use the ChaloBEST SMS service, which has been our core effort so far. We plan to approach artists and illustrators in Mumbai to create sticker and poster art, as well as poets and lyricists to contribute their writings on mobility, the city and transport-related themes (similar to the “Poetry on the Underground” and “Arts in Motion” programmes on London and New York City subways and buses).
This public media will be freely distributed by our beta testers to commuters, as well as nearby vendors, shops, schools and colleges who can use ChaloBEST to “adopt” their local stops and routes, serving as guides to lost commuters and explaining the service to them. Stickers, postcards and placards will serve as complementary tokens to the word-of-mouth sharing and “viral marketing” at stops and in buses. Route guides and maps generated from our spatial database will strengthen social networks amongst commuters at stops and in buses. We aim to use this public media build a wide community of users of our mobile applications and web services, to broaden the base of ChaloBEST and use our network to solicit donations of time, skills and funds.
We also hope to build an official partnership with BEST to display and distribute this public print and visual media on bus stops and inside buses – in advertising spaces which are left unutilised inside buses, as well as through digital video shorts produced by noted film-makers and broadcast on BEST-TV, marketing the ChaloBEST apps and services. We already have a data-sharing agreement with BEST for the first phase of our project, and have shown their planners and managers a preview of SMS and web applications currently under development. We hope to work more closely with BEST to incorporate user feedback, crowd-sourced data, and analyses of commuter patterns from ChaloBEST into official transportation planning.
We hope in future to develop web visualisations of the anonymous data now stored by BEST on the handheld printers and card scanners deployed to all bus conductors in early 2011. These new devices record valuable passenger, time, route, stop and other data when tickets are issued and passes are swiped. Their universal deployment in three short months earlier this year – by training, rather than bypassing the bus conductor – has been a technological success for BEST and the commuting public.
The long-term sustainability of ChaloBEST does not depend on large investments of capital or labour. Our work so far has already demonstrated this through our prototype SMS, web and Android apps, built by students and volunteers using free and open source software, locally-available, low-cost computer and mobile hardware, and public data provided by BEST. Our collaborative and open-source approach is driven by enthusiastic collaboration across disciplines to solve the social and technical challenges of sustainable mobility. As we complete our first phase of work, we look forward to scaling up through wider usage, feedback and participation over the coming year.
With the community and software built by ChaloBEST, millions of citizen-commuters can reduce stress, save time, as well as restore their civic pride and utility of the public infrastructure of BEST buses, stops and routes throughout Greater Mumbai.