Most big cities to which the so-called
‘brain-drain’ from India is directed, have one thing in common – their
public transport is exceptionally well organized and there are websites
which can guide you wherever you want to go, literally giving you
instructions at each step with precise estimates of times which would be
followed to perfection in real time. Obviously, for such a thing to
happen in India it would take a while, specially to build transit models
that can compute paan or biri breaks for drivers or bus stoppages
during rush hours for the conductor to come out of one gate and enter
through the other to make sure no one gets down at the next stop without
paying the fare (or lesser fare in exchange of no tickets to fill the
conductor’s pocket). Let us not harp on faults in the Indian systems and
give you some good news instead. Change has started.
The Center for Infrastructure,
Sustainable Transport and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), Indian Institute of
Science (IISc) Bangalore now offers you ‘Maargamitra’ – a friend on your
path. Launched on the 23rd of July, 2012 the Maargamitra website (planyourtrip.civil.iisc.ernet.in/Bangalore_PIS/) is an interactive interface that can help you plan your trip within Bangalore before you step out of home.
Funded jointly by CiSTUP, Department of
Science and Technology, Govt. of India and IISc, the interactive
web-based interface will not only display the best path (based on
minimizing the combination of walking time, travel time, waiting and
transfer time) over a map and as text, but will also tell the
approximate travel time and fare and number of transfers involved (if
any). Other than the best path based on minimum total travel time, the
trip planner also gives best path based on a unique concept of
‘generalized cost’, in which the best path is obtained based on a
weighted combination of walking time, travel time, waiting time,
transfer time as well as fare. Generally, it is a natural tendency of a
public transport user to attach differential importance to various legs
of a trip. For example, a person might perceive waiting time at
terminals as uncomfortable and would attach higher preference to a route
on which the waiting time is less or minimum. Similarly, an elderly or
disabled person may not like to walk more to reach a bus stop or train
station and thus will prefer a route that has less walking time, while
planning a trip. Some users may prefer direct routes as compared to
routes involving transfers, even when the direct route involves higher
in-vehicle travel time. All these considerations relevant for Indian
conditions can be imitated in trip itinerary planning, by considering
the generalized cost approach during shortest path analysis for finding
the optimum route through a multi-modal public transport network.
To keep it simple at the beginning, the
system has used default weightage values based on an initial study,
however, in coming months the trip planner will be updated to allow
users to provide their own weights. At present, Maargamitra covers
Big-10, Vayu Vajra, Vajra, and Metro Reach-1 services since data on all
Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) buses is not
available with BMTC either. Within the next year or two, most of the
public bus routes and Metro routes will also be covered. Other than
this, future plans to improve Maargamitra include providing k-shortest
paths instead of one best path that is presented currently, increasing
user choices and customization by giving option to the users to provide
the maximum number of acceptable modal transfers and their own weights
for different legs of the trip as input, as well as refining the travel
time modeling further to improve the travel time predictions for
pre-trip planning. Using Google Maps, C#ASP.net, TransCAD (a
Geographical Information System based transport modeling tool) and
C# windows.net, it has taken about two years to build the interface.
So what is so unique in Maargamitra that
sets it apart from Google Transit and other similar applications? When
asked, Dr Ashish Verma of CiSTUP, who has headed the project, replies:
‘Most of the other applications predict travel time based on an average
travel speed of 15kmph, whereas we have developed travel time models for
better estimation of travel time and which is used for pre-trip
planning. Moreover, Maargamitra is the first public transport trip
planner developed in India.’
As part of IISc, that does make you feel special, doesn’t it?Arpita Mondal (CIVIL)
(With inputs from Dr. Ashish Verma, Asst. Prof., CiSTUP)
No comments:
Post a Comment