Because of their code-breaking, British intelligence was able to catch most German agents as soon as they arrived. Some of them were given the opportunity to "turn double". One example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman
Note that "given the opportunity" meant "given the choice between execution and turning double agent", though some chose to turn themselves in and offer themselves up as double agents of their own will.
Well I'm assuming someone has probably already pitched something like this to them but as it's a budget service they do not want to add any more to their cost structure. I'm ball-parking that tech company would probably sell this to them for about $80k for the development plus a couple thousand a year in maintenance. Maybe they could add $1 to their ticket price as a premium service and if it was widely popular they could just add it into price structure (with some margin).
(side note - is this a common business concept or term, for adding premium services and then just adding that into the price later with the services included?)
Could a savvy hacker whip something like this up fairly easy? Possibly, but they would need to find this person first.
There are a few reasons. First, the Wi-fi only works about 70% of the time even though the buses are new. Second, these fleets have hundreds of buses. It's not clear that mapping a given bus to the schedule it will run is a trivial problem. Clearly that information is already in the dispatchers' and drivers' heads, but is it in a computer system?
Finally, Megabus already has a system that's supposed to send you a text message if the bus is delayed. It never works.
This hasn't been my experience, but I've ridden BoltBus less than a dozen times. Every time I've had smooth sailing WiFi from beginning to end. In any case, this can be solved via an independent data plan.
I'm not sure how their scheduling works, but certainly they do have some sort of computerized scheduling system. When I called the operator at 8:35 today she put me on hold for ~40 seconds while she, presumably, looked up the status of the bus. I wonder if they don't already have an informal internal service for keeping track of bus status?
I can say that I had my share of boltbus, megabus and the chinatown bus companies and although most of the time the wifi works, when it doesn't it's mostly useless to complain. They even have a sign saying that "the driver doesn't know how to fix it".
In spite of this, it's my favorite way of traveling between cities, right after the train system, although I rarely use the latter, since the prices are outrageously high in the US.
