Advice on App design for school bus ticketing

gillpb

Would be grateful for advice on any apps to manage ticketing for school bus routes. I guess I'm looking for a very slimmed down version of the Oyster card system as we will need bands and also a cap on the amount spent (for those who purchase bus passes).

Does anyone know of such an app - or a rough cost of how much it would be to get one developed. Also, recommended App developers

Many thanks

agrinnall

What capacity are you asking in? Parent, School, Local Authority, Transport provider?

If something suitable doesn't already exist then I'd imagine that it won't be a trivial task to build it, you really need to engage a designer who will establish the requirements and come up with a solution, and possibly a separate coder (and maybe a tester) to actually create it. Not cheap, and not something that you want to be doing without suitably qualified and/or experienced people. You mention Oyster, just think about how much it must have cost to develop that.

gillpb

We're managing 10 buses with 3 different price bands. At the moment passes/tickets are checked when pupils get off the bus in the morning and before they get on the bus at night.

Looking for an option that needs less people also also catches those who pay a lower band when they really get on/off at a higher banded stop.

victor2

10 buses is a very small number for such a solution. Ignoring the software side for a while, just consider the technology you would have to invest in for "an option that needs less people". Some sort of pass held by every user, reading devices on each bus and a live link to a central database, hosted somewhere, to record and validate each user.
The investment required for that would keep 10 part time bus staff employed for quite some time. Then there's the software required to manage it. If there isn't something already available, you are probably looking at many 10's of thousands of pounds in development costs. Even if something is available, it isn't going to be cheap - the demand for it is pretty limited.

InsideInsurance

gillpb wrote: »

Would be grateful for advice on any apps to manage ticketing for school bus routes. I guess I'm looking for a very slimmed down version of the Oyster card system as we will need bands and also a cap on the amount spent (for those who purchase bus passes).

Does anyone know of such an app - or a rough cost of how much it would be to get one developed. Also, recommended App developers

Many thanks

South East trains have been trying to introduce a oystercard type system for years. The readers appeared at our station a few months after we moved there and a year later Staff were given cards to trial. Still no sign of it being used for customers and I've lived there over 3.5 years now.

I would be as quick to immediately say that this isnt doable but its not a small under taking. Unless you have massive expansion plans and want to use this as your USP or you'd consider marketting this solution to other companies and this becomes another facet to your company then its going to be cost prohibitive.

There is no real way of estimating the price without a much better understanding of the proposal and exploring the "what if" scenarios to understand the complexity you want

System

Hi

I would ask this kind of question in the Raspberry Pi forums, where you will get lots of advice etc.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/

I would see a barcode reader/scanner (or a camers) with a Pi attached and a locally cached storage database that is updated every evening.