Waiting at a bus stop is your weakest, smallest, most ignorant (in the technical sense, not a personal stupidity sense) moments in your day.  You cede all sorts of control and information that you could use to understand the context of your wait to a process that is subjected to a variety of forces hellbent of ruining it.  Traffic, weird passengers, sick drivers, bad weather, rogue North Carolina farmers – all of them are out there ready to make you wait even longer.  The only thing you can do is stand there and hope the bus will make it.  It always does but the relief you feel when you can grab a seat on your bus is not appreciation for an efficient public transportation infrastructure; it is Stockholm Syndrome.

When you wait at a bus stop, you are waiting passively.  All of the variables in the interaction – the bus stop, the bus route, the bus number, the schedule (ha!), and finally you – are relics of an age where information required organization to be recovered.  Encyclopedias broke subjects to their elements so that an alphabet would lead you to some data.  A city would determine the most valuable routes to serve a population of commuters.  Everybody understands why these systems were originally designed and we have learned to live with the consequences.  Buses are always late; they are always clustered when they arrive; and you can’t change that.

When Slate.com asked readers to propose updates to public transportation, I proposed a solution that would change the way users wait for buses.  This realignment would revolutionize the way people relate to their public transportation.  Rather than considering buses as road-trains (fixed to a track-like bus route and schedule [ha!]), people will think of buses like livery cabs.  This is a valuable shift and one that would increase reliance on the bus system and improve mobility in a city.  My solution was called Smart Buses.

Smart Buses inverts the call/stop button on a bus.  In the old system, a rider waits at a bus stop for a specific bus to arrive.  The rider then pulls a rope to tell the bus to stop at another bus stop to depart.  In a Smart Bus system, the rider calls a bus at the initial bus stop and is picked up by a bus waiting for the call.  The Smart Bus then drops the rider off at a pre-determined destination (that was indicated at the initial call).

In this new system, the wait at a bus stop is active.  You are not waiting for a random process to notice you – you are calling for attention.  It is a shift in power and a streamlining of information.  The variables are simplified and the incentive to riding the bus is greatly improved.  Riders stuck across town can find their way to jobs anywhere in the system without depending on a limited set of bus routes.

More on this to come. (ha!)