Software tracks bus locations

Tired of blindly waiting for the next shuttle to arrive to pick you up in front of the… Tired of blindly waiting for the next shuttle to arrive to pick you up in front of the Cathedral, wondering if it will be two minutes or 20?

Wait no more, says a North Carolina company.

Students at North Carolina State University-in addition to six other schools-no longer face the situation, common to Pitt students, of not knowing whether the next shuttle will arrive in 20 seconds or 20 minutes.

Instead, a 3-year-old company, TransLoc, has fitted all of their campus shuttles with Global Position Satellite tracking devices, allowing students to view the locations of their buses online in real-time.

After logging onto TransLoc’s website, students can view a map of their campus with color coded bus routes and watch blips of all shuttles making their rounds. Students can watch all active buses or view one route at a time.

In addition to an online service, TransLoc offers a text-based version of their tracking system available to students’ cell phones.

“[Students] can hit the snooze button those extra five minutes,” Josh Cohen, a spokesman from TransLoc, said. “You can see that your bus won’t be here for a while, so you know you have time to eat a bowl of cereal before the bus reaches your apartment.”

Some schools have also put the TransLoc feed on display monitors at major shuttle stops.

In addition to NC State – where all four of TransLoc’s founders earned computer science degrees – the company has contracts with Auburn University, Emory University, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, the University of Alabama, Harvard and Yale.

“As soon as TransLoc came up there were visitors on the site,” Ralph Clayton, Alabama’s assistant director of transportation services, told The Crimson White – Alabama’s student newspaper. “It reduces frustrations because students can see where their shuttles are.”

While TransLoc has added numerous big-name schools since their start in 2004, don’t expect to see Pitt on that list anytime soon.

“We have not talked with any of the transit folks at Pitt yet,” Cohen said.

“What we have noticed at these different universities is that students play an integral role in having this kind of system on campus, so if the students say that this is something they could be interested in, the university is much more likely to look into it,” he said.

At Auburn, for example, the Student Government Association passed a resolution calling for their university to open negotiations with the company.

Pitt’s Student Government Board president Sumter Link remained open-minded about whether or not SGB would consider taking a similar action toward adopting the new program.

“I don’t want to tell you that I would or would not support the program without looking into it more,” Link said, “but anything the students are in favor of, I’m willing to give it my attention.”

When asked about the cost of the program, Cohen hesitated to give an answer, saying he “was not comfortable” sharing that information.

“At most schools, it’s probably only a couple bucks per student per semester,” he said.

There are 23,730 undergraduate students at NC State – about 6,000 more than at Pitt. Cohen declined to get any more specific about the potential price of bringing their service to Oakland.

If students were to push for the University to open negotiations with TransLoc, and if Pitt were to reach an agreement with the company, it would still take about three months for the service to install the necessary GPS hardware and create the campus-specific software needed to provide their service.

NC State transportation and transit manager Pat Mitchell said that TransLoc can enhance campus safety.

“Rather than waiting at a stop in inclement weather or after dark, riders can check the TVS (Transit Visualization System) website and find out exactly when their bus is approaching their stop,” he said in an NC State press release.