Economical LBS for Public Transport: Real-time Monitoring and Dynamic Scheduling Service

Public transportation plays an increasingly important role in building sustainable cities. However, a major deterrent to using public transport is the uncertainty of the length of waiting times at stops. This research suggests a solution based on location tracking based on an example of the use of tram transportation in Blackpool, north-west England. It utilises two mobile services: one involving real-time monitoring; the other involving dynamic scheduling. The former is intended for use by public transport managers. The later is intended for use by the general public. Both provide information on the current location of the next tram and its estimated arrival time. The system, TramInfo, was built by PHP and AJAX and the embedded application software was developed by J2ME based on Symbian OS. Future work is also discussed.