Here’s an intriguing thought: a school district shares certain information from its routing software to update its student riders about changes to their school bus stop … on their cell phones.
It’s not as far-fetched as it might seem, according to a CNN article last week. A 17-year-old student in Seoul, South Korea has developed just such an application for his iPhone that gives real-time updates of changes to public transportation Web sites to indicate the status of bus stops.
Aptly named “Seoul Bus,” this app has already been downloaded nearly a half-million times. And there are about as many students nationwide here riding the school bus. The comparison doesn’t stop there. Sure, most Seoul teenagers ride public transit to and from school, as many do here in the States, and transit in South Korea like here gets much more public funding, the likes of which the school bus industry can’t even get a whiff of.
South Korea and other Asian countries like Japan, CNN points out, have much more advanced intelligent transport systems, or ITS, than we do. But, it must be pointed out that South Korea’s ITS is an off-shoot of our Intelligent Vehicle Highway System, pushed by the Federal Highway System in the 1990s. The U.S. version still hasn’t gotten off the, er, ground.
But consider that Orbit Software, Inc., recently released its TRIPpatrol, a real-time school bus GPS tracking app for iPhones (and it should be noted for other new smart phones like the Droid). As Orbit asks in its advertisement, “Do you know where your buses are?” Who’s to say that we can’t ask the the same to students of their school bus stops?
It might be slightly more than an apples-to-oranges comparison in more ways than one, considering South Korea is a bit smaller than Kentucky in land size. But it’s an example of possible new technologies that could soon be made available to individual school districts.
