Ivan Rosales-Robles is tired of planning an extra 30 minutes in his schedule for the South Campus buses.

He’s had lengthy waits for the bus and has missed it when it came early. In an attempt to decrease wait time, the sophomore business management and policy major downloaded an app called USE to track buses, but found it only provided information on the Connective Corridor.

There was no information about South Campus.

“It would be great if the app worked for South Campus buses as well,” Rosales-Robles said.

A new app, Tiramisu, has been created to provide information on South Campus buses. Users will need to share information regarding bus routes they take, among other things, as Tiramisu relies on crowd-sourced information, said Yun Huang, a research assistant professor in the School of Information Studies who is heading the implementation of the app at SU.

Aaron Steinfeld, a senior system scientist in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, helped develop Tiramisu at the university in the fall of 2008. Steinfeld is one of the leaders of the development team.

“We set out with the goal to help people with disabilities,” he said.

The crowd-sourcing aspect of Tiramisu was originally developed to provide information to wheelchair users about buses that were at maximum capacity, Steinfeld said.

This evolved into just one of the features of the free app that has gained popularity among a wide demographic of commuters in Pittsburgh. The app gets its information from more than 51,974 trips reported by users, according to its website.

Tiramisu also provides real-time bus arrival information and the location of bus stops based on reports from riders. A “Report” button on the bottom of the app menu allows users to report problems with the transit trip or share suggestions and observations as well, Huang said.

Huang formerly worked at Carnegie Mellon and was involved with developing the app, so she decided to take the project with her when she came to the iSchool in August.

In Pittsburgh, Huang said, the app was very affective at encouraging more users to provide feedback to bus agencies about their experiences.

A study done in Pittsburg revealed that for every 28 bus riders, only about 10 percent had ever reported issues to bus companies. This number increased to 80 percent after Tiramisu was implemented, Huang said.

“We try to encourage citizens to report issues so they feel like their voices have value to the service providers,” she said.

Currently there are more than 1,600 reports about the app and transit systems, according to the Tiramisu website.

In cities like Pittsburgh and Syracuse that can’t afford to install GPS systems on all of their buses, Tiramisu’s system of using GPS information from phones also allows it to provide information about all of the bus routes offered by service providers, Huang said.

Linda Dickerson Hartsock, director of the Connective Corridor, said the creators of Tiramisu met last Wednesday with creators of USE, the app that performs similar tasks for Connective Corridor buses and has GPS tracking capabilities, to discuss a potential collaboration.

Although Hartsock said no specific plans are in place for a collaboration, the meeting has started a conversation between the two app developers, which is sure to continue in the future.

“We are going to keep moving this forward,” Hartsock said. “And I think we all hope that we’ve started on a project that brings together both the strengths of USE and Tiramisu.”

Published on October 23, 2012 at 1:41 am

Contact Shannon: smhazlit@syr.edu