Petition ACTION and the ACT Government for a Mobile Application!

WTF is wrong with bloody ACTION? They have been working on that stupid Google Transit data for TWO YEARS. There has to be someone in the system being obstructionist.

Who did you talk to at ACTION who claimed the Google Transit project was stalled for political reasons? Were those reasons ACTION internal, external or unspecified?

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, to coin a phrase.

Good luck trying to get the government to track movements of their buses in “real time”. When we complained to ACTION after my family almost got wiped out by a bus that didn’t give way, it took a denial, a dodge the question and then finally after two weeks an explanation that the driver had “recently left the company” to get our answer.
As for the “App”, if you’ve got internet service, just look up the website like the rest of the community and write down the times and bus numbers on the back of your hand. It’s not rocket science. If you depend on your phone to catch a bus, maybe you shouldn’t be wandering outside on your own.

Agreed with Shneyney123.
Having a mobile application would make it a lot easier on all of us to find the next bus at the nearest location. and I doubt it would be that expensive for action to simply give a list of all their locations (seeing as all the new buses do it anyway as they’re GPS enabled from what a nice bus driver told me).

Let’s look at the alternative: downloading an entire timetable which you must manually scroll and guess if a bus is late or non existent. If there’s no cost to action, heck, if there’s a small cost, as a taxpayer, I’d be willing to pay it!

And please could you make it free with ads? I’m a poor ANU student too!

well done you – I’ve installed it but don’t catch buses often

If it is political, why can’t you lobby the pollies instead of those at ACTION. Anything to give that sort of information would have to be a plus so I fail to see their reasons not to make it available. But then again, I am just an average joblo..

No bus system is perfect, and as far as bus systems go, there are alot worse than Action. Buses can be late for a number of reasons outside the control of Action, such as more people getting on, more people paying by cash as opposed to tickets, bus break downs, etc. In other words, tossing more money at making the system better, while necessary, will not wipe out late/non existent buses. To help mitigate this, a system such as ours telling people which buses are late would increase their faith in Action, and in my opinion would well warrant a relatively small budget expenditure. Furthermore, having buses that run on time without telling people EFFICIENTLY what those times are is much like telling people what movies are on at a cinema without telling them when they are playing.

Brilliant project, and kudos for actually taking the effort to develop the software.

ACTION really need to have a look at what Melbourne is doing with the Metlink website. Information is easy to access and there are mobile applications available.

That ACTION actually has the data available but wont give it to you due to “political reasons” seems completely retarded to me. Giving people easy access to route and timetabling information is fundamental to running an effective public transport system.

I’ll point out that people who wish to direct feedback at ACTION can make use of the feedback form at the canberra connect website here.

Bah. I’d be happy to have the Google Transit stuff working. But I can’t understand why they can’t provide you with that data, there wouldn’t appear to be an additional cost to them for that.

If there’s an additional cost to govt to provide you with the data, why shouldn’t Action make a budget decision to prioritise their spending? Sounds like trying to have government subsidise your vanity project.

Really, why should government fund anything more than what’s required to get on the right bus at the right time (ie timetable data)? I’d prefer they spent funds on getting the buses to run on time, rather than on telling us which bus is running late.