Since 2000, city bus services across the world have attempted ITS systems. The earliest adopters of ITS have been bus services in the US, such as Massachusetts, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. As early as 2005, Chicago implemented ITS features like vehicle location, computer aided dispatch, and automatic passenger counters for its fleet of 700 buses.

But adoption across the world has been slow. In 2015, when Google began showing real-time transit data, it offered only six regions — Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, UK, Netherlands, and Budapest.

Since then, more cities have added real-time tracking of their bus services. Smartphones have provided an impetus to real-time tracking, as a wave of new apps that provide real-time tracking were released — Transit App, Moovit, and Citymapper.

Today, there are more than 50 transportation agencies that provide real-time transit data, according to Transit Feed, a site that tracks this.

ITS implemented by some providers like Singapore’s bus service go a step further: it even provides real-time data on how crowded the buses are.

ITS in India

In India, different cities have experimented with different parts of the ITS system. For example, Indore implemented vehicle tracking and electronic ticketing on a fleet of 100 buses. Ahmedabad’s BRTS has tried smart cards for payments and enabled real-time scheduling. Bhubaneshwar has implemented fuel monitoring for around 100 buses.

Several cities have implemented electronic ticketing machines, though only Mumbai and Bangalore have implemented it across the board.

With the support of World Bank, Mysore has also implemented an ITS project that provides real-time bus tracking and passenger information systems for its 500 buses.

In a first for India, passengers in Kolkata can track buses on Google Maps in real time. The West Bengal Transport Corporation has implemented vehicle tracking for 600 of its 1200 buses in collaboration with Google Maps.

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