Archive for July, 2007
Monday, July 30th, 2007
Art in Transit
I’ve been meaning to interview my friend Anukul (the voice of buskarma these days) about his involvement in Pittsburgh’s Art in Transit program, but it seems that WQED has saved me the trouble: Art in Transit is a program that turns Port Authority transit vehicles into mobile galleries by filling unused ad placard space inside [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Pittsburgh,Signage,Surroundings by Joe Hughes
Sunday, July 29th, 2007
Visualizing Walkability
When I first read Jane Jacobs’s seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, this passage resonated with me: Being a structural system in its own right, a city can best be understood straightforwardly in its own terms, rather than in terms of some other kinds of organisms or objects. However, if the [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Maps,Metrics,San Francisco by Joe Hughes
Monday, July 16th, 2007
Guerrilla Signage
Since we’ve been chatting about the iPhone enough recently, let’s look at some low-tech solutions. How about plain old paper? A new site called SeptaMadeBetter.org is encouraging riders to print out their own signage and post it on bus stops and rail stations. This is a great idea: if you can adopt a highway, why [...]
Comments Off - Posted in Activism,Maps,Signage by Joe Hughes
Sunday, July 15th, 2007
Realtime Muni information for the iPhone
It’s been a couple weeks since my last post about transit and the iPhone, and we’re starting to see some iPhone-optimized transit information. Turncolor, a software startup, has created MuniTime, a pretty iPhone widget that counts down the time to the next bus or train arrival at a particular stop. MuniTime currently supports San Francisco [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in Mobile,Portland,Realtime,San Francisco by Joe Hughes
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
The iPhone is good for transit
The topic du jour in the geek press is the iPhone, and I can confirm that it is indeed the bees’ knees. I found it interesting that two different online commentators saw fit to point out today that the iPhone is a great way to pass time on public transportation. First, here’s author Steven Johnson: [...]