"I'm a bus" Part 1 - The idea

I'm working on an exciting little project at the moment, with some colleagues of mine from Hursley, which could have an impact on how people travel to work...

2500+ people work at IBM Hursley and so there is a minibus which picks people up from nearby Chandler's Ford and takes them to work three times each morning, and returns them at night. A while ago we instrumented the bus with a GPS tracking device and a button which allowed people to see its whereabouts using a map on their smart phone, and see how many free seats there were on board.

This greatly helps reduce the number of people travelling in their cars and back every day. But this is just one route - it would be impossible to provide a minibus from all the many locations that people come from to reach Hursley! But what if the cars coming in and out of Hursley were also able to act as minibuses, and pick up other IBMers along the way? Then, we would have mini-minibuses coming from Winchester, Portsmouth, Alton, and many other places!

So the idea of the "I'm a bus" scheme is that car drivers using a smart phone can record their journey to and from work, and upload it as a bus route on the "I'm a Bus" website. Every day, when they leave home, their route becomes active, showing the car's current location. Passengers who need a lift in to work can stand in a safe place on the route and request a lift, via their own phone. The driver's smart-phone will announce using voice technology that "Joe Bloggs has requested a lift in 1000 meters on Hursley Road" and will display a picture of them from our internal employee directory, so they can be recognised. The shared journey will be recorded, and you can see the environmental savings you and everyone else combined (in terms of miles saved and carbon dioxide) has made on the website.

This means people can measure their contribution to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, develop a wider network as they pick up new faces en route to work, and also, as the driver, you can specify a preferred contribution, which the passenger will see prior to requesting a lift. This might be a "cup of coffee", or a suggested contribution per mile.

Of course, once this is running, there are lots of enhancements, which could be made, including allowing traffic / weather information to be shared from web feeds or from other driver's information, sharing planned routes as well as impromptu routes, and provide a full list of possible options for getting around (eg ties with bus, train and taxi services)

So.... this is the *idea*. Turning it into a working system is something we've been working on for a while. It will rely on good intuitive technology that doesn't require lots of learning, and it will require enough people to use it, to make it effective. In my next post, I will reveal how we're getting on!