Both Coach USA and First Transit have GPSs on most of there buses. Many urban transit systems use a Google Transit tracker. I dont know but I just am assuming that the reason we dont have this is that is just one more pain in the keister to deal with or just just dont know. Winter and waiting for a bus in on a rural road inthe woods when dispatch is closed on weekend and at night is no fun.
I see mature add-on tracker applications and platforms in many of the transit trade magazines, both here and in Europe. No few of them add onto existing 'fleet-tracking' apps, or include many potentially useful fleet-tracking and maintenance-optimization features 'nearly free' for bus operators who don't have those capabilities from an expensive legacy service.
The actual service involved in streaming the position information from the buses is offloaded to local devices which then do the job of calculating, say, how long you can linger at home before you have to start walking to the bus stop ... and encouraging you to walk a little faster if the bus starts to be early. This is not rocket science with any of the smart-device IDEs.
The problem (as in the current Mass Transit Journal) is that many of the target passengers relying on tracking precision are people who can't afford either smartphones or a reliable data account. There are some very good designs for 'data panels' that use solar charge and e-ink for low power consumption but good reliability (there are some other considerations too) so they get put out at the stops and update themselves periodically to inform folks. They could easily accommodate voice info in multiple languages for 'head down' information ... or retransmit information for apps on local devices.
Be best to have neighborhood groups and merchants 'sponsor' each of the devices (perhaps with advertising a la the Motor Vehicle Network) and then support the inspection and maintenance via something like the adopt a highway program.
My local rural bus network on Catterarus County started out as a schoolbus contrator then got eaten by Laidlaw who then in turn got eaten by First Transit although runs Greyhound and Contract Transit around the world pays little attention to the hundreds of short line bus companys that make up the whole of its company. Its like they are basicly independent. No real effort is made to have a cohesive national network where the smaller rural transit companys meet uo with the big bus or meet up with Amtrak. The same story is with Stagecoach which owns Coach USA. Each franchise makes uo its own rules and opperates independently. Coach USA also contracts with local goverments for rural transit and medical rides. They also own Megabus which also operates on its own. So trying to lobby both companys on the Corp level have come back with teh Answer the such decisions are made on the local leval and calling the local franchise garage in this case Coach USA Erie or First Transit Cuba NY has told me that I should contact the National Office or the My Local Goverment Offcial. Now if Uber can have a Taxi Tracker GPS whats the hold up here?
The United States as of yet have a Public Transportation System
There are also people like myself who prefer a dumb phone because a smartphone is a rather expensive way of providing access to information you don't always need to have at your fingertips.
CSSHEGEWISCHThere are also people like myself who prefer a dumb phone
And of course there is a very-well-established set of technologies for doing data extraction and conversion and then text-to-speech conversion that would easily (and more significantly, autonomously) provide the necessary information on any voice-only phone. (Note that SMS on a dumb phone that can receive texts is so trivial to implement this sort of data tracking on that it can be treated as a minor subsystem of a smartphone instantiation).
Running a small constellation of appropriate agents in 'the cloud' will provide the necessary intelligence to run the voice interface a 'normal' person would need to dial in, figure out the best route or routes, arrange for callbacks when it's time to set out for the stop, etc. In my opinion any reasonably competent modern 8-year-old with the right IDE and access to voice APIs could program this in hours or days. I might add that one of the OP's 'sweetheart' projects ... "one-stop" information sourcing for extended connections, including those for other modes ... could be very easily accommodated in this approach.
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