Commuters in the city will soon be able to track buses of the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC), Chennai, on their mobile phones through the Locate and Access My Bus (LAMB) app.
Live tracking of the buses has been made available in a third-party Chalo app on a trial basis.
GPS-based system
A senior official of MTC said the project aims at providing passenger information system (PIS) using global positioning system (GPS) technology for the commuters to access the availability of buses through a mobile app.
“The app is almost ready with the fixing of GPS in 3,200 buses. The live tracking of buses is available under a beta version in Chalo app and once fully completed, it will be migrated to the LAMB app," he said. The COVID-19 lockdown has been used to fix the GPS equipment in all buses when they were idle. “At present, under the beta version, the accuracy of the arrival time of buses is being checked and once the accuracy rate is under one or two minutes, LAMB would be launched,” he said.
The MTC officials said that under the LAMB mobile app, more than 3,500 bus stops and 700 routes have been geo-coded. Users can track the arrival of five buses with route numbers in real time at any bus stop, locate the bus route and list nearest bus stops.
Live tracking
The live tracking of buses would be available for the commuters on the MTC website www.mtcbus.tn.gov.in once the LAMB app is launched.
The project is part of the larger fleet management project called Intelligent Transport Management System (ITMS) to be executed under the Chennai Smart City project.