Right. Their little smiley telling me that nine people are being helped by my activating their app kept me longer at the stop than otherwise. The bus was four minutes off their prediction, though.
What does it take to add real-time data for a new city?
I've been interested in trying to scrape the data from the transit provider here. They have what appears to be reasonably accurate arrival predictions which they display through an atrocious app, and electronic signboards at some bus stops. The busses have a terminal for the driver that displays how long they need to dwell at times stops and announces the next stop, so I assume this is (at an unknown interval) transmitting the locations to their server.
I haven't gone further in looking at it yet, because google maps will only add data sources directly from the official transit provider.
I live in a major city of ~800K with one of the lowest public transit ridership in the US, and I've learned to not quite trust their time predictions. We do luckily have GPS location data, and I regularly just look at the bus' actual position to gauge time most of the time.
