Public Transportation in Pristina

Overview

With around 200.000 inhabitants (Kosovo Agency of Statistics, 2011), Pristina is the most populous city in Kosovo. The public bus transportation network has 34 bus lines operating within Pristina, but there is no information system on public bus transportation, where people could easily access the urban traffic information available. 

“Prishtina Buses” is a youth-led project, implemented by an open-source community – Free Libre Open Source Software Kosovo (FLOSSK) and supported by the UNICEF Innovations Lab Kosovo and two United Nations Volunteers. 

This project seeks to improve and develop access to public transportation by launching for the first time an online platform, where locals as well as international visitors can find proper and easily accessible information . The main goal of the project is to increase the use of public transportation rather than private cars, which would directly lower the air pollution in the city and enhance the quality of life there.

The project consists of two main phases.  In the first phase, data was collected with GPS devices on 16 of 34 bus lines available in Pristina (the 16 mapped bus lines are located within the central area and the closest suburban areas). In the second phase, the focus was on visualising the collected data in an interactive web platform by uploading them as a KML layer on top of the Open Street Map.

Since the official launch of this project (12 January 2012), the website has received over 33.000 page views, 5.000 unique visitors and  tremendous local media attention.

A low-cost project, highly effective impact, a user-friendly platform, and a great potential to scale up in other municipalities throughout Kosovo – this project is a great example of how youth-led initiatives, with flexible support and mentorship, can be turned into concrete and actionable projects positively impacting people’s lives, as well as offering a cutting-edge tool to the local institutions as a first step toward digitalisation of the local public transportation network. The long-term vision of this project is to design a smartphone application, to enable citizens to access real-time data about bus transport in Pristina.

Website:  http://prishtinabuses.info/