(Matthew Schuerman, WNYC) In Boston, your Android phone can tell you, in San Francisco, you can check your wrist watch. Now New York, which has not been nearly as advanced in installing GPS-tracking devices on its buses, is dipping its toe in the waters.

New York’s MTA is putting in the devices as part of a pilot program to test smart cards — computer-chip embedded fare cards à la London’s Oyster card. Because those cards need a modem, the buses’ whereabouts are tracked — and that information can be disseminated to riders.

The smart card pilot launched in June on eight Manhattan and Bronx bus lines. Riders tap their fare cards instead of swiping them. Later this year, the MTA will begin taking the data from one of those routes and send it back to riders that request it, via text messages or the web browser on their cell phones.

“If we are successful in implementing this program we will drastically reduce the cost and time needed to track our 6000-bus fleet,” MTA spokesman Kevin Ortiz said.

The MTA last year began going down a different, more traditional path. The authority installed digital countdown clocks at eight bus shelters along 34^th Street in Manhattan that told riders how long it would be until the next bus arrived. But Ortiz says that outfitting all lines throughout the city with those clocks would cost $140 million and take at least five years—assuming the authority could come up with that amount of money by then, given its budget crisis.

One drawback: the new approach will only tell riders where the bus is, in terms of distance or number of bus stops, but not when the bus will arrive. Ortiz says the MTA will open up its data so that software developers in the private sector can create smart phone apps.

“We will welcome the efforts of developers to help develop a robust prediction system that can deal with very difficult traffic and real world conditions associated with taking a bus throughout the city,” Ortiz said. “But right now we are not going to let the difficulty of making these predictions keep us from moving forward with what we can do now.”

The authority has selected OpenPlans to develop the software for processing the GPS data under a $265,000 contract, according to MTA documents. The authority hasn’t chosen which route will test the system, but it will be one of the eight routes where the smart card pilot’s been operating (M14, M23, M79, M89, M101, M102, M103 and BxM7). The pilot will start some time later this year, Ortiz said.

OpenPlans is also the nonprofit behind the websites StreetsBlog and Gotham Schools.

OpenPlans’ business development manager, Michael Keating, says that the bus location information is deliberately low-tech. It will be provided through the web or text, rather than a smart phone app, he said, so that people with most ordinary cell phones can still benefit.