MARTHA: building a realtime bus-tracking system from scratch

[Joe Hughes]

Every so often I run across someone who wants to try to build their
own bus-tracking system using GPS smartphones and a server, so I was
happy to run across a project that actually did that.

The GEORGE bus system is a small local bus service in the Falls
Church, Virginia area that connects to WMATA in DC:
http://www.fallschurchva.gov/Content/CultureRecreation/GEORGEmain.aspx

MARTHA was a project to build a realtime tracking system for GEORGE
using consumer hardware and a relatively small budget of ~$200K. Adam
McGavock from the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission sent me
a couple of final reports on the project, which I've uploaded for your
reference:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21183773/MARTHA-Project-Final-Report
http://www.scribd.com/doc/21183601/MARTHA-Project-Final-Report-Slides

According to Adam, the code is currently owned by the state of VA, but
they're working to open-source it so that it can hopefully be improved
and reused in other places.

Joe

[Nick]

My application lets anyone use their own mobile phone to create/manage
a public GTFS feed for the area they live in, and send their GPS
coordinates to a server which then lets other users wishing to travel
on the same service query for the vehicle's current location and ETA.

http://www.mojoplanner.com/wmr/android

(Sadly, I don't think it's going to do too well in ADC2 because only
half of the community judges actually had any interaction with the
server, and of those, only 2 actually made it as far as the route
editor which works like "My Maps" but also snaps to Stops for easy
editing.)

I wish I could get a similar amount of funding as MARTHA so that I
could finish porting my server-side code to App Engine, update my
JavaME app and port to iPhone...

On Oct 17, 5:21 am, Joe Hughes <joe.hughes.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Every so often I run across someone who wants to try to build their
> own bus-tracking system using GPS smartphones and a server, so I was
> happy to run across a project that actually did that.
>
> The GEORGE bus system is a small local bus service in the Falls
> Church, Virginia area that connects to WMATA in DC:http://www.fallschurchva.gov/Content/CultureRecreation/GEORGEmain.aspx
>
> MARTHA was a project to build a realtime tracking system for GEORGE
> using consumer hardware and a relatively small budget of ~$200K.  Adam
> McGavock from the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission sent me
> a couple of final reports on the project, which I've uploaded for your

> reference:http://www.scribd.com/doc/21183773/MARTHA-Project-Final-Reporthttp://www.scribd.com/doc/21183601/MARTHA-Project-Final-Report-Slides