Building a Grassroots Transportation Information System

CSE 590f seminar

Wednesday,  Feb 11, 4:00 pm,  CSE 403

Building a Grassroots Transportation Information System

Beth Kolko

UW,  Dept. of Human Centered Design and Engineering

Ruth Anderson

UW,  Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering

In this presentation we will discuss the development of a transportation information system designed to make the sharing of transportation resources more efficient and effective. The system is built on GPS and SMS technologies, and it bridges the gap when there are no public facilities or agencies managing public transportation resources in a city or country. The prototype of the system (*bus) was developed for deployment in Kyrgyzstan.

Our talk will describe (a) a longitudinal ethnographic study in Kyrgyzstan that demonstrated the importance of transportation resources in the developing world and how to plan for an appropriate ICT solution, and (b) present the results of a proof-of-concept system engineered to create a bottom-up, transportation information infrastructure using GPS and SMS.

Transportation is a shared resource; enabling efficient and effective use of such resources aids overall development goals. The system, *bus, involved creating a hardware device (a *box) containing a GSM modem and a GPS unit, that can be taken onto a vehicle to track its location. The *box communicates via SMS with a server connected to a simple GSM phone. The server runs route prediction algorithms and users can send SMS messages to the server to find when a bus will arrive at their location. We will discuss the system and early testing, as well as the development implications for a range of urban and rural environments where transportation is scarce or inefficient, and where a central authority or institution is not in a position to provide robust information resources for users. We describe how the solution is also situated within technology usage patterns common to the developing world.