I live in Wellington, New Zealand - and we’re unlikely to get modern tramways for a while, but we do have an extensive bus network. Busses are pretty average compared to trams, but I don’t think it has to be that way, and I’d like to propose some quantitive measurements that can be done to ensure the quality of drivers of the busses.

The main trick is to install a device in each bus that records the bus driver, the route, the timeliness of the route, comfort and fuel efficiency. You could use something like an android or iphone, since they have gps, accelerometers, a user interface and 3g connectivity.

Bus driver

The bus driver gets on the bus, types their name into the phone and they are logged in. They then specify which route they are running and the measurement system can work out where the bus should be.

Timeliness

Measure the location of the bus against the measured stops. Use this data to show a timeliness report (as they do in Melbourne) and use this data to decide what changes need to be made to routes, traffic lights and bus lanes. Instead of drivers having to rely on anecdotal evidence, they can show why changes need to be made to each route, for example, a sector may need to be made longer or shorter, route timings changed.

This could be done on an ongoing basis as traffic patterns change season by season.

Comfort

This is a big one. The major problem with busses after timeliness, are bad drivers. The main factors of a bad driver:

• Accelerate really hard, causing a huge amount of noise. If you’ve ever seen a baby sitting in a pram on lambton quay when one of the old diesel busses accelerates away you’ll know what I mean. This is uncomfortable for passengers, adds unneeded noise to the city, is dangerous for people on the street, promotes aggressive driving, and wastes fuel.

• Drive too fast through corners. Some bus drivers drive their busses like race cars. And some driver their busses really carefully and considerately. The considerate drivers need to be rewarded.

• Break too hard into a corner, don’t predict the lights and coast to a stop.

By measuring the gps location and instantaneous acceleration 10 times a second, with the phone, or measurement device, mounted in a rigid cradle at the front of the bus, it would be possible to create a measurement for how smooth and efficient a bus driver was.

It would be easy to measure when a bus driver wasn’t driving smoothly and comfortable.

Learning and improving

I’m not sure what the best way to use this data would be. It seems like paying bonuses or penalizing bad drivers would be the most effective way to ensure a competition for smoothest driver, but I imagine there are kinder ways of rewarding correct behaviour.

It would be very important for all measurements to be compared correctly against other drivers on the same route, on the same bus, and at the same time of day, as some routes would be by necessity more intense than others. If you’ve taken the bus through vogeltown or roseneath you’ll know it’s a pretty windy path.

It would also be important for the data to be used to make changes at the roading and management level as well, instead of just passing the buck onto bus drivers and expecting them to do miracles. Wellington City Council should improve busways where needed, relying on real data, not anecdotes. And the bus company management should be made accountable as well.

Especially for buying the bad old MAN busses that are wheelchair-hostile and noisy as hell.

Public data

Finally, all this data should be publically available (in an suitably anonymized, aggregate form) so that ratepayers know that they are getting value for money from their subsidised bus service.

(If anyone actually wants this thing to be built and exist, I’d recommend getting a local company like youdo, southgate or silverstripe to build it)