Dude, Where’s My Bus? Ask DIYcity!

Imagine never having to wait for the bus again. That’s the idea behind a revolutionary bus tracking system that the M.T.A. has had in the works for more than a decade. Riders could whip out their phones or go online to find out exactly when a bus would arrive at their stop, or track the real-time location of the buses as they chugged along their routes. But about eight weeks ago, while wrangling over their $1.2 billion budget deficit at a City Council oversight hearing, the M.T.A. risked losing the reported $14 million contract they were awarded to implement the tracking system. According to a NY1 report, M.T.A. officials said “forget about it.”

John Geraci, founder of DIYcity, a site that encourages people to use the Web to reinvent their cities, has a better plan—and it wouldn’t involve the M.T.A.’s approval. His proposal would place the tracking system in the hands of the people—or rather, their phones. How would it work? An intelligent tracking application, costing pennies per person, would automatically activate on a person’s phone when they climbed onto a bus.

“It just pings a system that says, ‘I’m here, now I’m here, now I’m here,’ and it knows your commute route so it knows what bus route you’re taking already,” Mr. Geraci explained in an interview with The Observer. All of that information would be gathered and organized by a server and distributed online and in mobile phone applications to other users, he added.

Mr. Geraci, 38, with his long legs crossed and his blond hair blown back away from his face, was sitting on a bench at a park in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where nannies were pushing strollers and preteen skaters were slapping the pavement with their boards. A block away, the B75 Bus, which will soon disappear if the M.T.A.’s proposed service cuts are implemented, lurched along Court Street.

Mr. Geraci said the M.T.A. shouldn’t be proposing service cuts and price increases, but asking themselves how they can transform—and cheapen—transportation services with technology. His DIYcity initiative challenges tech whizzes, futurists and even regular Facebookers to take transportation, and other antiquated city services, into their own hands by using modern technology—from geospatial tracking devices to social media platforms like Twitter to government data and stats.

DIYcity isn’t just a Web site but a movement, according to Mr. Geraci, that will empower people to revolutionize the way they live, work and spend with the Web.

“If you just look around at the city, health, crime, traffic, quality of life, all of them have areas that could be offloaded to the Web and done much cheaper than they’re being now and possibly better than they’re being done now,” Mr. Geraci said. “You can’t wait for cities to make these changes. These changes are ready to happen and people can do them on their own, with or without the city.”

MR. GERACI STARTED the project in October by creating a simple Web site and a blog post. “Our cities today are relics from a time before the Internet,” he wrote. “What is needed right now is a new type of city: a city that is like the Internet in its openness, participation, distributed nature and rapid, organic evolution—a city that is not centrally operated, but that is created, operated and improved upon by all—a DIY City.”

He set up wikis—editable online forums—for people to discuss problems that people could tackle with technology, and posted regular “challenges,” encouraging people to work on specific projects, like traffic or biking conditions. In October, he proposed that DIYcity participants build a Twitter application that would help users avoid traffic and get where they’re going faster. By February, volunteers built a mobile phone application, called DIYtraffic, which pulled information from Yahoo’s traffic data and sent it directly to people’s phones, alerting them to traffic jams, accidents and street closures to avoid in their area. Users could also input their own traffic updates to add to the official feed.