{"id":3303,"date":"2019-06-25T08:54:48","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T08:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=3303"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:30:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:30:22","slug":"new-technology-seeks-to-ease-public-transport-convenience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2019\/06\/25\/new-technology-seeks-to-ease-public-transport-convenience\/","title":{"rendered":"New technology seeks to ease public transport convenience"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By <\/strong>Simon Peter Kaliisa<\/a><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the current City of\nKigali public transport guidelines, a bus ought to be ply a route picking and\ndropping off passengers at bus-stops every after 15 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, users of public transport say that\u2019s not the case while\nlocal bus stops are often characterized by long queues especially during the\nrush-hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To bring down the long queues, the immediate option would be to\nincrease the fleet size of various public transport operators which is not\nquite feasible as it would require sizable investments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Germain Rwibutso and Albin Shema have been working to present a\nsolution to the challenge. The duo has already come up with a solution using\ntheir knowledge in software development and Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rwibutso and Shema who own a technology startup (Binary Earth),\nthought of developing a computer system soon dubbed \u2018GERAYO\u2019 that would count\nand inform bus operators on the number of passengers on every bus-stop, that\nwould make deployment of the buses on various routes easily manageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rwibutso who spoke on the behalf of the company said that they got\nthe idea after they landed an opportunity to work with Akagera National Park to\nlocate the Giraffes in the park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfter getting the opportunity of working with Akagera National\nPark in locating the Giraffes we came to realize that the same concept could be\nalso applied to the transport system\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does Gerayo work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every bus-stop will be fitted with an unmanned camera, with a\ncapacity of taking pictures of passengers, do a head count and send data to the\nservers programmed to process the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bus operators will be notified on the waiting customer numbers and\ncan deploy buses accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rwibutso adds that this will all done by the system using\nartificial intelligence and will a time lapse of only 5 seconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that the system has been tested during the pilot project\nwith 97 per cent accuracy. On reaching out to Rwanda Utilities and Regulatory\nAuthorities they were advised to incorporate the bus management and scheduling\nsystem to make it more effective before it is released for public use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On privacy concerns, Rwibutso said that the public should not\nworry about their identity because the system will be tuned to delete the\npictures once the number of passengers has been recorded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rwibutso added that the kind of data they will be keeping is the\nfigures because going forward they will need the statistics to improve the\noperation of their systems, making it more effective and efficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They plan to roll it out is within the next two months, starting\nwith Nyamirambo- Kigali City Center Route, given the heavy traffic of\npassengers on the route, Rwibutso said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rwibutso is convinced that Gerayo will spare passengers the time\nthey lose when waiting for the bus and it will also put more cash in the\npockets of the bus operators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe hope that our solution will have an impact on the time\npassengers spend waiting for the bus. Bus companies lose a lot of passengers to\nmotorcycle riders especially those who are impatient, that\u2019s why we believe the\nsolution is ideal for bus companies\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting it done<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rwibutso reckons as developing their own devices was the greatest\nchallenge they encountered, ordering them from China, configuring them and\nconnecting them to each other was not an easy task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given they did not resign from their salary jobs, Rwibutso\nrecalled that it was difficult for them to balance work and their idea given\nthat both were demanding. This often saw them work late into the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But shortly they were relieved and happy when their innovation\nbegan capturing data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rwibutso said another task emerged when the system started to enter in the data as they needed to configure it to analyze the data collected. On the start, they are targeting more 500 bus-stops across the city before rolling the concept out to secondary cities and eventually cross the border regional countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read the original article<\/a> on The New Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Simon Peter Kaliisa Under the current City of Kigali public transport guidelines, a bus ought to be ply a route picking and dropping off passengers at bus-stops every after 15…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3304,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}