Bangaloreans will not have to remember the confusing array of route numbers on BMTC buses to commute in the city anymore as a bunch of developers have come up with a mobile application that will tell you the route number to take to travel from one part of the city to another. The best part? It works without GPRS or SMS and is free to install.
The application was developed by four Mumbaikars, Raxit Sheth, Moksh Juneja, Neeraj Pattath and Saumil Parekh who had developed a similar application for Mumbai in 2009. To use the application, a user only needs to download the application from blr.m4mum.com on their mobile browser (or from a computer and later transfer it to their phone). Once installed, the user won’t have to spend anything on the application as all the information regarding the bus routes is stored within the application itself.
The application will ask you for the ‘From’ stop and as you type it’ll offer suggestions and it works the same way for ‘Destination’ stop as well. Once you have entered these details, the application will list the bus routes you could take to travel between these two destinations within seconds. “We created the application for Mumbai because we used to travel by bus in the city and it wasn’t easy to figure out the routes. For the Bangalore application, we used the same framework and used the database created by another developer who had come up with an online application for the same idea,” Sheth says.
The application works on almost all the phones in the market, no matter who the manufacturer is as long as it supports Java based applications. Around 4,000 people have downloaded the application in Bangalore within a week of the launch and Aneesh Prabhakar, who has been in Bangalore only for the past three weeks, is one of the people who have been using the application to commute in the city.
“When I came to the city I used to ask my friends which bus I had to take to go to my training centre and back but I just use this app now. I wish it would tell me the bus timings too; the buses are so erratic here,” Prabhakar says.
Apart from Bangalore, the developers have made a similar app for Pune too and in the future plan to make one for Hyderabad too.
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