Chelaile could be China’s best bus tracking app, but limited cities are a dealbreaker

Chelaile, literally translated as “bus is coming,” is an app in China that allows users to track public bus locations in real time. The Chinese startup just received a US$5 million series A round of funding from undisclosed investors, according to 36kr.

Bus schedules in China are often erratic in a feast-or-famine sort of way. Sometimes two of the same number buses arrive within seconds of each other, and sometimes they are spread 30 minutes apart. This results in wasted time and overcrowding for passengers. Buses are usually the cheapest way to get around major cities, though, and they travel to more locations than metro and subway systems.

Chelaile was made to take the stressful guessing game out of the equation. Just type in your preferred bus number or stop name, and a map will reveal the real-time location of all nearby buses. Users can also check the status of buses they want to transfer to and set up alerts for when a certain bus is a specified number of stops away.

Chelaile has quickly grown to 600 million registered users since it was founded last year. The app claims to compensate for issues with GPS drift, data return frequency, data loss when buses go under bridges or tunnels, and unexpected stops for refueling or maintenance. All that data is made available by recent government initiatives to make public bus GPS data available to private companies.

But not every city has been quick to adopt it, which means Chelaile is limited to eight cities for the time being. Four out of five of China’s biggest cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou – are noticeably absent.

That’s a dealbreaker for many would-be users, because Chelaile is probably the best bus app in China in terms of functionality. A worthy alternative can be found in Pandabus, although it lacks the real-time tracking feature.

See: This Bus App From China is So Good It Makes Me Actually Want To Ride The Bus

(Source: 36kr)