Google Maps has long offered transit trip planning and, with TANK’s route and schedule information included, helps many of its thousands of daily riders plan their trip on public transit.
Now, with the addition of “real time” location data from every bus in the fleet, customers will know if the next bus due at their stop is on time. TANK bus riders can start planning a trip right from TANK’s website home page, via Google Maps.
“Google Maps is a very popular trip planning tool for our riders. Adding real-time trip updates allows better planning and more certainty, saving our riders time. It makes a great trip planning tool even more useful,” said TANK General Manager Andrew Aiello.
TANK adheres to industry “open data” standards by sending this new real time data in compact form to Google via the General Transit Feed Specification-Real Time (GTFS-RT).
A complementary application programming interface (API) allows application developers easy and free access to the same data with additional filtering options.
TANK encourages app developers that are already in the business of providing transit information to incorporate the TANK data into their apps, to better serve current riders and attract new people to try public transit. TANK offers a webpage especially for developers to stay up to date on the current active feed.
This new travel feature is expected to be a popular addition to the TANK website.
“Having real time information available is a game-changer for people that use transit,” said Aiello. “Being able to have more predictability in schedule allows busy customers to use every minute of their time to be productive, arriving at the bus stop when the bus is predicted to arrive, in real time.”
Real time information is now available at www.tankbus.org.
Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky
