SINGAPORE — Commuters can now get more accurate bus arrival timings on the Land Transport Authority’s (LTA) MyTransport.SG application and third-party apps using LTA data, with 95 per cent of buses arriving within three minutes of the estimated time.

When the LTA’s enhanced bus arrival timing system was launched in April, accuracy was at 80 per cent.

“Since the system’s launch, LTA has monitored public feedback to fine-tune the system and provide higher quality data,” said the LTA in a press release today (July 16).

The system predicts SMRT and SBS Transit bus arrival times based on real-time bus location data, bus route information, bus schedules and historical travel times. It uses location data provided by a global positioning device mounted inside each of the 4,700 buses to do so.

To improve the system’s accuracy, the LTA tapped on commuters’ feedback to ascertain bus service routes and locations that were more prone to conditions affecting accuracy, such as traffic, GPS signal strengths and unanticipated demand, and correlated these with more than 50 million data points collected daily. This led to further refinements such as software prediction algorithms, said the LTA.

“Today, the bus arrival timing has stabilised with 95% of the estimations falling within three minutes of the actual bus arrival time, which is comparable or even better than other bus arrival timing systems,” said the LTA.

“With LTA’s Common Bus Fleet Management system that will be implemented in mid-2016, scheduled bus data presently provided by bus operators, will be centrally managed by the system. This will result in more consistent and higher quality bus data, translating to even better accuracy,” said the LTA.