Archive for June, 2007
Monday, June 25th, 2007
Better Service vs. Better Information
The Sick Transit Chicago blog asks: can good realtime information trump short headways? I suspect that there’s a tipping point for headways—if the bus or train comes every 10-15 minutes (or better), riders can feel comfortable just showing up at the station, confident that they won’t have to wait too long. If the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Portland, Realtime by Joe Hughes
Sunday, June 17th, 2007
Discussion on Transit Data Openness
Jaap Weel’s recent posts about data sharing in public transit are worth a read. Here are some excerpts:
Dutch transit data locked up
Under traditional (and current American) copyright law, public transit timetables cannot be copyrighted (IANAL, but I’m fairly sure of this). With the European database directive (the one that was supposed to stimulate the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Data Sharing by Joe Hughes
Thursday, June 14th, 2007
The Armchair Dispatcher
Over at SFist, Matt Baume has been doing bang-up job on the MUNI beat. One of his innovations is the NextBus screencast, as demonstrated below:
By taking a time-lapse video capture of the online real-time bus map (and he details his methods in this post), he can go back and speculate about how things went [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Activism, Operations, Realtime, San Francisco by Joe Hughes
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
The Need for Small Agency Transit Software
Nicole Tedesco from TCAT, a transit agency in the Ithaca, NY area, posted this informative discussion of the challenges that some agencies face in making their schedule data available to the public. She ends with this request for better tools for small agencies:
So, this is my challenge to Google and to all of you [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Google Transit Feed Spec, Small Agencies by Joe Hughes
Saturday, June 2nd, 2007
WhereCamp
I had a great time at the (hopefully) inaugural WhereCamp SF today. Brandon Martin-Anderson (of Graphserver fame) and I ended up leading a session on “Hacking Public Transportation”, where we had an interesting discussion about transit mashups, the difficulties of getting transit data from agencies, and how neo-geographers and transit hackers can help transit [...]