Background Story: LAND TRANSPORT AUTHORITY AWARD TENDER OF $68 MILLION FOR NEW BUS MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
I consider the project to implement an "intelligent bus management system" for $68 million to be expensive and wasteful.
Here are some economical ways to improve the current system:
1. Deployment of buses to meet demand. The data that is collected for fare computation can be analyzed to determine the demand for buses on various days and times of the day for each service. They can be used intelligently to plan the deployment of buses on each route. During peak hours, all the buses should be fully deployed, but during off peak hours, the frequency can be reduced to save cost and still provide an acceptable level of service.
Cost of this analysis: estimated to be $20,000 to $50,000. Can be done by local experts.
2. Identify buses that are bunched together for each service. The bus operator already has the means to identify the bunching of the buses, as they have the GPS location of all the buses in real time. If they want the front bus to move faster or the rear bus to move slower, they can send a message to the bus by SMS or mobile app. Quite likely, they want to do nothing. It is not the information or technology, but the human decision and judgment that has to be taken.
Cost of mobile app: $20,000
3. Bus arrival time. This information is already available and provided to commuters. The data from both bus companies can be sent real time to the a server at LTA and made avaialble to developers to build into their mobile apps. Currently, the operators restrict the access to the data (for some strange reason), so LTA has to step in to make it available. If the data from SMRT is not reliable, LTA can require SMRT to improve it.
Cost of building the server: $20,000
4. Better management of bus operations. I don't understand why this has to be provided by an expensive, "intelligent" system. Does it imply that the top managers of the bus companies do not know how to manage the operations?
TOTAL COST OF MY SOLUTION
The total cost is estimated to be $100,000, instead of the $68 million that is being spent by LTA.
Tan Kin Lian
*Article first appeared on http://c-onyx.com/page/1821