Bus Better

Public bus systems suffer from unreliability and safety concerns, leading to poor passenger experience and operational inefficiencies. This results in decreased ridership and distrust in public transportation. For this hackathon we are specifying students as our target but all people who commute using public transit are affected. This problem matters because commuters are still experiencing reliability and safety issues with our current day public transit infrastructure. Cities are also becoming more and more dense contributing to higher levels of traffic and air pollution. Our solution will ideally lower any barriers to using public transit and incentivize people to use it more, therefore lowering traffic and pollution as a direct result.

Our team learned how to outline requirements, not only including functional expectations, but also back-end factors such as data sources and maintainability. We also realized that it is better to prioritize certain requirements before adding additional features, rather than trying to add every idea we like into the initial design. We had a lot of great ideas to expand upon after the MVP was completed. Some of these features are to gamify the app and incentivize users to commute more using public transit via the app. Ideas such as a mercy system for riders who forgot their pass for a day or lost their wallet, monthly fare credits for good/frequent riders, etc. Also incorporating collaborations with local artists for bus designs for the exteriors to make riding the bus a more fun and enjoyable experience for everyone!