

Dear BoltBus - rgejman
http://ron.gejman.com/blog/2010/12/16/dear-boltbus/

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btucker
This is a nice feature request, but can we try to get out of habit of
proclaiming enhancements as "trivial" without knowing anything about the
architecture? We all hate it when our customers/clients/bosses do this to us,
right? Let's lead by example.

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tmcneal
Being able to see delays via a mobile app might be enough to get me to try
BoltBus and Megabus again.

In my experience, BoltBus and Megabus have extremely poor customer service.
I've had multiple bad experiences with them and as a result I refuse to use
their services any more.

Last month I waited an hour and a half in 40 degree weather for the Megabus
from NYC to Philadelphia. Throughout that time, none of the staff on site had
any idea of what was going on, or if they did no one told us what the problem
was and when we could expect the next bus to arrive. We heard later that both
buses scheduled during that time had broken down.

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rubashov
You can have dirt-cheap or you can have customer service. The east coast
intercity bus lines are very clearly built around the former.

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dantheman
But you can have dirt cheap and provide information - that's really the
service that people want. They don't need a massage, free food, live
entertainment etc... Information can be cheap - put a transponder on all the
buses and push out a kml feed.

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micheljansen
It's not that hard to do this and the service it provides is great. I
currently live in Princeton, where they have the TigerTracker:
<http://princeton.transloc.com/>

And I know that, for instance, the Swiss railways can also be tracked in real
time: <http://www.swisstrains.ch/>

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jonafato
I've been in this same situation before. Campus busses at my university do
this; why can't a company that only does buses do it too? In fact, I'd even
pay an extra buck to see the info. They could use GPS data plus a phone app to
improve their ticketing system too. i.e. use your phone to check in when
you're in front of the bus and it gets verified on their site instead of
handing the driver a piece of paper and an ID.

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bitwize
I live in Boston.

When I saw _Salt_ in the theater, there's a scene where Evelyn Salt, in
disguise, rides in from DC to New York. The audience laughed when they saw her
on the BoltBus.

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tdoggette
The site's down. Does anyone have a mirror?

~~~
btucker
Sorry, no mirror that I can find. Basically the author was describing his
experience needing to wait outside in the cold for a late BoltBus. He didn't
mind so much that the bus was late, but wished he knew how late it was going
to be.

He then wrote the company saying they should install GPS tracking in the buses
so a customer would know exactly when it was going to arrive and could thus
seek shelter in a coffee shop until the last minute.

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BluePoints
Why wouldn't they do this?

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mbesto
Well I'm assuming someone has probably already pitched something like this to
them but as it's a budget service they do not want to add any more to their
cost structure. I'm ball-parking that tech company would probably sell this to
them for about $80k for the development plus a couple thousand a year in
maintenance. Maybe they could add $1 to their ticket price as a premium
service and if it was widely popular they could just add it into price
structure (with some margin).

(side note - is this a common business concept or term, for adding premium
services and then just adding that into the price later with the services
included?)

Could a savvy hacker whip something like this up fairly easy? Possibly, but
they would need to find this person first.

