Bus Monitoring App Is Simply A Diamond 

Finally, the public transport monitoring capability that I have been seeking for a few years has materialised, from one local operator at least.

Diamond buses have launched bus tracking on their website, and via a mobile app, to show where each of their vehicles is on a map.

Technology to do this has been available for years and it mystifies me why operators have been so slow in making it happen.

Now, the operator of local Solihull and rural services has come up trumps and provided what some far bigger players have yet to do.

There is obviously a slight lag as the GPS tracking signals make their way back across the airwaves and via the Diamond servers to the internet.

Also, the map only appears to update a couple of times a minute but, having used it a few times on my local route, each bus is typically no more than a few hundred yards in from of its stated position at worst.

This is invaluable to passengers in conditions like those shortly before Christmas when Diamond could not operate on parts of its rural routes and buses that were running were subject to disruption.

The ability to tell when a bus is going to turn up, if at all, rather than hang about in the cold and wet is a huge boost to quality of service.

Perhaps other local providers would take note.

For instance, the biggest, National Express, currently charge ‘25p plus your standard network operator rate’ for someone who knows ‘the 8 letter code for local stop’ to get a text message of ‘the time the next few buses will arrive’!

Dave Pinwell

Dave Pinwell is a prolific blogger and IT enthusiast and has kindly allowed us to reproduce his popular weekly IT Talk column first published in the Solihull News. Dave is also CEO of Colebridge Trust and SUSTAiN which play a key role in providing strategic support to Solihull’s Voluntary & Community sector. Dave has extensive experience in the IT sector, with roles including IT Director with Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Ltd.

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