New York, NY —

Bus riders in Midtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side are seeing the wave of the future: new electronic displays telling them when they can expect the next bus. Fifteen signs have now been installed as the MTA begins using global positioning systems to track its buses. WNYC’s Beth Fertig has more.

REPORTER: Unless you’re standing inside a bus shelter, staring at the wall behind you instead of the street, it’s pretty easy to miss the MTA’s great leap forward in customer service.

TORTON: It tells you how many minutes until the bus come?

REPORTER: Alicia Torton was waiting for a downtown bus on 86th street and Second Avenue when she noticed a large, red blinking message. It said ‘next M15 arriving in 5 minutes. She was pleasantly surprised.’

TORTON: Yeah definitely, you’re always wondering when it’s coming, then you have to read that thing if you don’t have your glasses with you.

REPORTER: The display signs are much bigger than the tiny schedules posted at bus stops. They’re also supposed to be more accurate. The 168 buses in this pilot study have all been outfitted with global positioning systems, allowing New York City Transit to see where they are at any given moment and keep waiting customers up to date. Right now, the sign says an M15 is three minutes away. But -

TORTON: Oh here it is. It’s early. See, it’s early. Arriving it says. That wasn’t three minutes. See that’s a lie. They lied! (laughs)

REPORTER: Maybe they can’t get it right every time. But the MTA is finally doing what other transit systems from Chicago to Buffalo have already done to improve both scheduling and customer service. John Grass, an Assistant Chief Transportation Officer at New York City Transit, says GPS can help alleviate the bane of riders everywhere: bus bunching.

GRASS: We may not be able to put all the buses on time on their schedule, but we may be able to – and this is where we hope to go - to keep headway, which is the time between buses, even. So instead of seeing a bus bunched together we’ll be able to spread them apart so they’re coming at the particular stop every 3 minutes or every 4 minutes instead of bunching together.

REPORTER: At the Bus Command Center in East New York, operators watch a computer screen with little yellow icons representing every bus on a given route.

WALSH: This would be 6th Ave, we got a bus right at 6th Ave at 57th and it tells me he’s running 3 minutes late.

REPORTER: Robert Walsh is managing the GPS project. Three minutes isn’t a big deal, since the buses are evenly spaced along the route. But if several buses all started arriving at their stops at the same time, Grass says operators here in the command center will be able troubleshoot right away.

GRASS: We may move one up, move around the other one, go down a few stops and start picking up at that point. We may have a spare bus and start putting that in service as well.

REPORTER: Bus drivers have little screens for text messaging and supervisors in the field carry handheld computers. But they still carry their existing radios and use phones as a backup.

So far, only 7 bus routes are taking part in the 7 million dollar pilot study – all in midtown and the Upper East Side. There are only 15 display signs in the bus shelters, not all of which are working. New York City Transit acknowledges there are still a few glitches. Officials wanted to experiment in the busiest parts of Manhattan because that’s where GPS encounters the most interference from tall buildings and the traffic is heaviest. On this M15 heading downtown, a little screen next to bus driver James Randolph tells him how many seconds he’s behind or ahead of schedule.

RANDOLPH: I guess when they get it up and running totally I mean they can call the bus and tell it to dlow down, tell it to speed up.

REPORTER: But, he says:

RANDOLPH: You can’t stop bus bunching unless you stop the traffic. You gotta do that!

REPORTER: The MTA hopes the pilot study will be completed by the end of the year… allowing the entire 78 million dollar program to go citywide. It’s also hopeful that customers will be able to check the internet for real-time bus schedules in coming months. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.