Skip to main content

Using technology to make PTSC better

I had planned to do a Q and A with PTSC about using tech and providing a better service but I pivoted and created this blog post. I crowd sourced ideas from social media and added my own ideas. What persons don't see is the hardship and begging and following up that goes into getting responses and questions answered from some entities. Whenever I can do this easily it is like a breath of fresh air. I would expect entities to be willing and responsive to persons working to make a difference.

What's the point of this you might ask? Someone is already being paid handsomely to come up with these ideas you might say. The point for me and my blog is about brainstorming and educating. We want an informed public. We want a solutions minded public. We want a public that is willing to help regardless. Such a public will be in a better position to hold the technocrats to account. Such a public will be able to demand better and decide better.

I would not go into the benefits of efficient public transport in this blog post except to say that there are huge benefits. I like the points raised in this article, 6 Reasons Why Access to Transport is so Important. The government recently announced that we are going to develop a new transportation plan relevant to the modern times we live in. Below are a list of ideas for the improvement of PTSC using tech that are worth considering

  • IoT and Big Data and scheduling software
  • eTicketing for convenience
  • Mobile app that shows when and where the next bus among other things
  • Monthly NFC pass for regular users
  • Using green energy to reduce cost and help the environment
  • Smart bus stops possibly starting with the Connected Arima project
  • Preventive maintenance software
  • Ticket machines in convenient locations
  • WiFi on buses to be productive while in transit
  • Learn from UWI student projects
  • Open data and APIs to encourage developers to contribute their own solutions
  • Tech for the business processes of PTSC. Think like any profit making business.

Share your ideas in the comments and share this blog post so that we get the most ideas. One comment I got that made sense was that the biggest improvement would come from having buses use separate lanes from regular traffic and this has nothing to do with tech. I agree but I still think tech will be needed for data and analysis to tell us where to put these dedicated lanes and the bus stops. Also what would be cost and time to build a network of dedicated lanes? I would bet that tech solutions would cost a small percentage of this.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

God opens doors

It is 1203am and I have decided to write. Saturday I spent the night coding. I was trying to get a FastAPI app up and running, all from my budget Android phone. The test cases were written to use Puppeteer. I ended up using Replit for that. Coding is more challenging when using a mobile phone. Not impossible but more challenging. I hardly blog about technology and coding anymore but the love is still there. I still have a dream of creating my own coding and youtube studio with a nice desk setup. That is nice but what should I make this blog post about? What do I want to write about? What should I write about? I love creating presentations. That is something I could do to revive my youtube channel. I love Maths too. I have this feeling that I could solve one of those longstanding Maths problems that seems impossible. Sometimes, like right now, I feel like abandoning my blog post. It is going nowhere. Maybe I should get up and go wash the wares. I wish God could tell me what to write abo...

Mundane

It is 123am and I have decided to write. I have this new idea for a book called Mundane. It would be me writing about the ordinary. We chase the extraordinary but there is beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty in the simple. There is beauty in the everyday. What about God? We often think about God in grand terms. But what if God is simple too? What if God is mundane? What if we look for God in the everyday moments? I sit in this dark room with the air conditioning on. The fan is also on. The curtain is down but I imagine the moonlight shining on the grass outside. The cats are probably sleeping. I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood is awake at this hour? Is there another writer around who is also writing about the mundane? The fan breeze helps the air conditioning cool me down. These nights are warm otherwise. A mosquito flies across my screen. Hello friend or foe. I cannot quite decide which one. If I had a swatter you would be gone. I check my notifications and there is an ...

What we do not know

It is 1245am and I have decided to write. I had this weird alienish dream and it ended with me winning by simply stating "the truth is that we do not know". In the dream everyone was having an opinion of what was happening as if they knew. On to something random. I had this question. What is the most unrandom thing? Then what is the most random thing? What if everything is equally random. My friend Chatty thinks that randomness is not an absolute property—it is a relation between you and the system you observe. Randomness is not absolute—it depends on perspective. Something perfectly ordered can seem random if you do not know its pattern. So in a sense, everything can be "equally random" relative to the observer's knowledge, making randomness more about perception than an intrinsic property. The more we know the less random things become. Let me make a detour. Suppose we do not predict things but things predict us. For example, when I flip a coin, did I predict ...