Apps for the City that You Love, Part 1
The First Bus App of Dhaka made on thunkable
Download First Bus App of Dhaka on Google Play
View app source code and/or remix your own version on thunkable
Dhaka (still) has no official bus map
If you have ever visited the bustling mega-capital of Bangladesh, you will likely see a colorful array of buses plowing the main arteries of the city. Collectively, these beasts of burden transport roughly 5 million citizens to their destinations within the relatively compact city each year.
Many of them are crowded beyond both capacity and comfort — but with high frequencies, expansive coverage both within the city and beyond, and an accessible price point, buses have become an essential part of daily life for most citizens in Dhaka.
Strangely though, if you look on Google maps or any other digital portal to the city, they are invisible. In fact, in many of the largest and most populated cities in the world from Amman to Mexico City to Queens in New York, you can find an Uber faster than you can find a local bus.
The reason for the absence is simple but unsatisfying — in many cities in the world, there is no official government agency responsible for operating the buses. In these cities, buses are operated by private operators who are given a permit to operate along a specific route. In cities like Dhaka, the private bus operators are not organized — with few official stops and no consistent or even visible signage, leaving many riders confused about where a particular bus is supposed to go.
The First Bus Map of Dhaka
Four years ago, inspired by the simple idea that everyone in every city in the world should have access to information to help them navigate their own city, a team of volunteers from an adventure and advocacy organization called Kewkradong Bangladesh (www.kewkradong.com) and MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning kickstarted a project to map the cities busy bus routes with the support of the SMART Future of Urban Mobility initiative (fm.smart.mit.edu) and the Mobility Futures Collaborative (mfc.mit.edu).
Without any official source of truth to refer to, the team of volunteers rode almost every bus line in the city to get the latest data on the current routes, organized that data by region of the city and inspired by the elegant subway lines of cities like New York and Paris, designed the paper bus map below for the millions of bus riders in Bangladesh.
The First Bus App of Dhaka
Four years ago, smartphones were not very popular in Dhaka especially among bus riders — and paper seemed to be the most appropriate medium to communicate routes to riders. While a paper map can communicate routes with little instruction and without a smartphone device, it could not help users solve the most difficult challenge that bus riders in Dhaka face: understanding where that colorful bus they saw on the street actually went.
Today, with the help of thunkable (www.thunkable.com), a platform for developing mobile apps designed for first-time developers, we are excited to make available the First Bus App of Dhaka. Riders can not only view the routes corresponding to those in the original 2013 First Bus Map of Dhaka but they can also match those routes with pictures of the bus companies that operated on those routes.
Since the routes in this initial version were mapped in 2013, there is a feedback feature that let riders give feedback on whether a bus is still running, upload a recent photo of the bus, or send a message about the bus line such as a route needs to be updated. If there is interest, the makers plan on adding the ability to add new routes to the app as well.
Download First Bus App of Dhaka on Google Play
View app source code and/or remix your own version on thunkable
We are hopeful that this is just the beginning of better information for all citizens in every city. If you have an Android, please download the app — and if you ride one of these lines in Dhaka, help us make it better by submitting feedback on the routes.
