Bus late? Swyft, Moovit harness crowd to predict arrivals

[...] a study by a San Francisco startup says it’s accurate about 70 percent of the time, with the worst performance during commute hours.

Some 40,000 Bay Area residents, about three-quarters of them in San Francisco, now use the app to report when their Muni bus, BART train or AC Transit bus is delayed, overcrowded or otherwise experiencing problems.

“The union of those two provides better context for riders” to figure out when their bus really will arrive, said Jonathan Simkin, co-founder and CEO of Swyft, which has raised a little over $500,000.

An app for iOS and Android called Moovit also uses crowdsourcing combined with transit information to predict bus or train arrivals.

When users ride public transit with the Moovit app open, it anonymously tracks their speed and location, and integrates that with schedules to predict when a bus will arrive.

The researchers winnowed that down to predictions within a 30-minute window before estimated arrival time, and then compared them to actual arrivals, which it figured out by looking at the final prediction a few seconds before a bus showed up.

Susan Shaheen, co-director of the UC Berkeley Transportation Sustainability Research Center, was not involved in the study but is familiar with it.

“But I would cast it in a positive light: 70 percent accuracy on arrival times is a vast improvement from where we were 15 years ago” before Muni adopted NextBus.

“This shows there are opportunities through public-private partnerships for data sharing that could offer systematic improvement in increasing urban transit,” Shaheen said.