February 7, 2019
By Vibhuti Naik and Rachel Zhang
Thanks to John and Keena Gao, getting to that Monday A Block class might be a little bit easier.
John and Keena, two Lexington High School students, created the Ride on Time app, which enables mobile phones to track Lexington buses. They came up with the idea in Nov. of 2017.
“I heard about a bus tracker device for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, a public transportation option in our area, and I wondered why our school buses did not have a similar application,” Keena, a junior at LHS, said. Keena and her brother John then began researching similar apps and websites and reached out to Elaine Celi, the Transportation Coordinator for Lexington. Celi maps out bus routes, which change every year based on evolving student needs.
This app differs from traditional software in its use of peer-to-peer communication.
“It maps out the movements of the bus that correspond to the students who are getting on the bus, so students waiting can see estimated time of arrival to their stop and get notifications before it arrives,” Keena said.
The app was inspired by the Gaos’ experiences waiting for the bus.
“We chose to create the app because we have experienced freezing mornings waiting for the bus since we were in elementary school. We were sick of not knowing where the bus was and whether or not it would come, so we wanted to give students the ability to organize and figure out where the bus was through a group coordinated app,” Keena Gao said.
The Gaos aren’t alone in their sentiments
“Yeah, I get cold in the mornings… It’s the worst part of my day, and my friends and I always complain about it, but there was always nothing we could do,” Ava Glavine, a freshman, said.
Creating an app like Ride on Time involves critical thinking and cost-benefit analysis.
“We debated pros and cons of certain functions and had to weigh what we really wanted to include in the app versus what we thought was extra,” Keena said.
For many of the app’s users, a major concern is the amount of data a peer-to-peer communication system might use.
“We would like to address the concern of data usage on our app and say that the only use of data is to send and receive coordinates of the bus, keeping the data usage to [a minimum]. In a month of daily usage, I only spent around 2MB,” John said.
These young entrepreneurs have major plans.
“Our big dream? To eventually deliver our services to over 50 million kids in schools all over the United States. As a peer-to-peer system, Ride on Time Tech LLC is scalable because the focus is on the user who has the power to communicate with other students on their bus,” Keena said.
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