Never Ride The Bus The Same Way Again

What if there was a tool for developing local public transport improvement plans that helped  explain complicated, traffic concepts to the everyday common citizen who actually is most likely to use public transportation? BusMeister was created with this in mind and is now available in beta.

The idea behind BusMeister, developed by GreenCityStreets.com, is to help residents understand the benefits of improvements, allow citizens to provide input on public transportation programs within their own neighborhoods, and spur creativity among non-specialist community members who just may think of new ideas professional transport planners cannot see.

Public transport works best when it’s part of a well-integrated sustainable transportation network. To help make public transport more attractive to the public, BusMeister also includes complimentary measures , a section devoted to make public transport more efficient to operate as well. Here the relationship between public transport and measures such as liveable streets, public bicycle systems, parking management and transit pricing strategies will be addressed and open for public comment.

GreenCityStreets intends to use the Busmeister Blog to communicate best practices, and open community forums regarding Improving Public Transit. This area of the site includes ideas such as speeding up the boarding process, optimizing stop design, reducing traffic congestion and transit signal priority, just to name a few.

In addition to using BusMeister for specific planning projects, the tool was designed to help public transport operators collect information on ideas for improving lines throughout their network. The plans are for BusMeister’s social network to include a simple version of the tool to be integrated with a local public transport operator’s own websites and planning processes.

BusMeister also includes entertaining games to encourage public involvement with their city’s transport system improvements. While still in the development phase, GreenCityStreets says they plan to continually update their games by adding features and more challenging puzzles to create an interesting online and real-life community feeling among resident users.  Local public transport operators who add customized versions of BusMeister to their website should also see a subsequent increase in website traffic – encouraging game players to use other website features, learn more about their own local public transport agency, sell products (e.g. mobile phone tickets), and, most importantly in the eyes of GreenCityStreets, to encourage players to support their local public transport agency.

This tool also offers a public transport best practices library worth visiting as well as the option to play the BusMeister game via the website or directly on their facebook page.

Play Bus Meister >>