While some of the jerkiness can no doubt be chalked up to the vehicle, in my experience some drivers definitely have a lighter touch than others. Why not reward the attention paid by a conscientious driver to the quality of the ride? A simple accelerometer in the AVL package would likely be enough to figure out who was doing a good job. (There’s at least one company, Road Safety, selling this type of hardware for first-responder, commercial fleet, and of course anxious parent applications.)

Rather than using this system to punish careless drivers, it’d be be better (if more costly) to offer incentives for a driver to opt into, and perform well in, this type of monitoring. In some ways, this would be similar to the pilot programs that Progressive Insurance has run in which private drivers can choose to have their driving behavior recorded in exchange for reduced insurance charges. This way, it can preserve driver dignity at the same time that the smoother rides improve rider dignity.

By taking a time-lapse video capture of the online real-time bus map (and he details his methods in this post), he can go back and speculate about how things went awry. The example above shows how a detour for a street fair was handled. Neat!

Incidentally, since SFist doesn’t seem to offer a syndication feed for just their MUNI category, I threw one together using Pipes:

SFist MUNI Category RSS feed