A team of researchers from University of Aberdeen, UK, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, People’s Republic of China, and Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai have looked at the effects of availability of a smartphone based real time passenger information system on a passenger’s willingness to use public transport. Their studies reveal that although there was an initial excitement for the app, there were insufficient users required to scale up.

Public transport in large Indian cities are often plagued with unforeseen delays, thanks to the traffic and inefficiency of the public transport system. Now, researchers have used the power of technology to make this a thing of past. Using concepts from data science, researchers have developed a simple web-based application that can accurately predict the arrival and travel times of the Metropolitan Transport Corporation buses in Chennai, based on historical data collected over a period of time. With such technologies, researchers say, the wait for a bus might soon be over for ever!