Department of Transportation

Residents in Taipei City and New Taipei City are travelling between these two cities very often on bus. The Taipei City Government is now working in cooperation with the New Taipei City Government to integrate the real-time bus information service. It is scheduled to complete by end of next year (2014). People will then be able to look up information on the same platform for consistent and up-to-date information about buses going to and fro between these two cities.
Taipei City and New Taipei City each had its own real-time bus information system installed in 2004 for passengers to look up the expected bus arrival time at each bus stop. The number of users in access to the system in Taipei City is about 1.97 million every day, and it is 470000 in New Taipei City, suggesting that real-time bus information is an essential and key bus service.
Many people commute between Taipei City and New Taipei City on a total of 225 bus routes across these two cities. The demand for looking up bus information on bus routes in the two cities is higher. The two cities have worked on the connection of bus information to each other in 2012. The bus arrival information is available on the intellectual bus stop, mobile version website of Taipei City bus (pda.5284.com.tw) and the bus information telephone system.
However, there are still some inconsistence and mistakes in bus information displayed in these two cities. For instance, when the final bus passes each bus stop, it’s shown in Taipei City that “final bus passed”, but it is still displayed as “not departed” in New Taipei City. In the circumstances of changes of bus routes due to traffic control, it is indicated “Bus not stop for traffic control” in Taipei City, but in New Taipei City, the scheduled arrival time is still displayed. Such inconsistent information can be very confusing to passengers. By connection to the other bus information system, there could be some lag in information update usually about one stop time lag.
These two cities are now working hard to solve these problems. The Taipei Public Transportation Office is in charge of the task with both city governments participated in the planning process. The goal is to provide more convenient, up-to-date, consistent, stable and complete bus schedule information. Initially, an integrated platform and user end system will be established with the same searching page and information display layout. The cloud computing structure will be adopted, in order to meet the highly demanding information load. Other relevant services will also be available such as public transportation planning service in Taipei City and New Taipei City, foreign language versions of search system in Mandarin, English and Japanese, and bus standing position codes. Details will be settled at meetings between the two city governments. This task is scheduled to finish by end of 2014.
An integrated bus information system in Taipei City and New Taipei City will provide more convenient bus information service. The shared resources between the two cities such as the integrated bus system will save more budgets for future system establishment, maintenance and management.

2013-06-28