Smart cities: Why Oslo wants its buses to do far more than just transport people

Smart cities need lots of data for planning, decision-making and new services. Mass-transit vehicles are everywhere in the city, so using them to provide real-time data for these applications make obvious sense.

However, Oslo’s buses currently have seven separate and proprietary systems on board, to support live data for several functions, including ticketing, passenger information, position reporting to the control center, and providing technical maintenance data to the bus operators.
These systems don’t interoperate and, in some instances, they even need separate radio communications for their respective uses.
Ruter has been engaged in international standardization work through public transportation tech association ITxPT to address the vendor lock-in it’s been experiencing.
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