This was a semester-long group project from fall 2006 at Georgia Tech. We interviewed current users of MARTA (Atlanta's public transportation system) to find problems in the current public transit system that make people not want to use it.

We discovered that the main problems with the public transit system were:

• the buses are infrequent, often coming only once an hour
• the buses break down and it takes a long time for another bus to come
• buses do not run on time
• it takes a long time to get anywhere once you're on the bus
• the trains, though they don't have the other problems that the buses do, go to very few parts of the city, making them hard to use

We had several solutions that addressed these problems in various ways:

• Collaborative Mobile Games (COMO) - Passengers play games together on the public displays in the buses and trains to build a sense of community and make the time pass more quickly
• Marta Assist - People may find routes and receive arrival times on their mobile devices to help them plan ahead if the bus is late (e.g. they may choose to use their car instead)
• StreetCATS - A radical alteration in the way bus routes work--routes are generated dynamically based on the locations of the passengers and where they want to go, using buses more efficiently, reducing wait and travel times

We chose to prototype and test StreetCATS, which we deemed to solve the underlying problems best of the three solutions. This involved building a flash interface and giving users various scenarios to test it with. We only tested the interface, as we were not actually able to change the bus routes.

You can read more about the project in our short CHI submission.