The Delhi government has introduced an all-in-one public transport app called One Delhi for the convenience of frequent travellers who use public transport and electric vehicles.On this app, a commuter can buy a bus ticket or pass, find live tracking of over 7300 buses, locate the nearest bus stop or get the exact waiting time, and find electric vehicle charging stations spread across the city.
Meanwhile, Bangalore Metro Rail Corp’s (BMRCL) QR ticketing service on WhatsApp will make travel and ticketing on the Metro extremely simple and convenient for the people of Bengaluru. “The first-ever transit ticketing service on WhatsApp, BMRCL’s WhatsApp chatbot enables quick and simple ticket purchase integrated with payments on WhatsApp,” said Abhijit Bose, head of WhatsApp India. The chatbot is integrated with UPI powered payments on WhatsApp and will allow Namma Metro commuters to purchase tickets and recharge their metro travel pass right within WhatsApp.
BMRCL is said to be the first transit service globally to enable end-to-end QR ticketing on WhatsApp. It is available in English and Kannada for all commuters of Namma Metro.
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Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal (PMPML), the public transport bus service provider for the twin cities of Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad and Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority (PMRDA) region, is revving up its act as well. It has signed a pact with Google Cloud to build an intelligent transit management and feed system to track buses live on Google Maps. PMPML operates 371 routes around the Pune Metropolitan Region including 117 Rainbow BRT routes that ply on the seven bus rapid transit corridors. The collaboration will help it ingest real-time data from all applicable buses from the OBU (on board unit) system installed on the PMPML buses. They will further validate the data for GTFS field-values. Then the data will get fed to the Google Maps Partner Dashboard for a complete GTFS validation.
Once published on Google Maps, Live Transit Updates service will allow commuters to track buses in real-time on Google Maps.
“This technology has the power to be replicated across different cities and states in India and make life easier for commuters,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, MD, Google Cloud India.
The bottomline: Rapid advancements in our city transport systems will entice people to leave their vehicles at home more often, contributing to a more sustainable environment.
