Mon 28 Jan 2008
SoCalTIP, an early citizen-run transit site
Posted by Joe Hughes under History, Schedules
[5] Comments
These days most every transit agency has some sort of online presence, but it wasn’t so long ago that the web was a curiosity known only to academics and those savvy enough to seek out early ISPs. Even at that early stage, the benefits of putting transit schedules online were clear, and so transit riders worked to fill the void.
Bay Area residents in the late ’90s were well-served by the Bay Area Transit Information Project (Internet Archive link), a student project which eventually morphed into the official 511.org that we use today. This effort inspired others like the SoCalTIP page for Southern California transit.
Chris “aka Wad”, who writes for the excellent MetroRiderLA blog, was one of the co-founders of SoCalTIP, and he agreed to answer a few questions about the old days:
When was SoCalTIP launched, and when did it finally shut down?
SoCalTIP was launched in 1996. After a little under a decade, Ray Mullins and I decided that it was just far beyond our capabilities, and the site just faded away. The domain name lapsed in 2004.How did it originally get started?
It was inspired by the Bay Area Transit Information Page, which started in 1994 or 1995. That was created by two college students as a thesis project. Ray helped them out with their efforts.Southern California had a similar need. We have about a hundred different transit agencies, each maintaining its own information center. Since there’s no centralized information center in Southern California, it was up to transit advocates to provide one. We did, and we gave most transit agencies their first online presence. The BATIP template was carried over for SoCalTIP.
What features did SoCalTIP offer at its peak?
SoCalTIP’s most valuable asset was having the schedules in one place. It listed every transit agency from San Luis Obispo and Kern counties to the north, San Diego and Imperial counties to the south, and Las Vegas to the east.We also kept the most simple site design possible. We didn’t use a lot of graphics, all of our schedules were fixed-width (Courier) plain text, and everything was easy and ready to find.
Many people had requested us to build a transit planner, but this would have been way beyond the capabilites of a volunteer site. Instead, we offered routing advice via e-mail, and the routes we came up with from our heads could beat computer-generated routes any day.
Who were the people who were most involved with creating and maintaining the site?
It was a collaboration of several people, but full-time, I typed schedules and was the public face of SoCalTIP while Ray maintained the server end.What kind of maintenance did it involve?
The upkeep on such a simple site actually involved a lot of maintenance! When I typed up schedules, I would have to include some code for Ray to put it in his textproc program. He then had to put it in a format that the SoCalTIP server (Unix) would like.Eventually, this led to a backlog of schedules that Ray was never able to process.
What kinds of discussions did you have with the agencies themselves, if any?
I had many discussions with most of the transit agencies listed. More often, they were cooperative and helpful. A couple would send me schedules ahead of time to get them on the site before they went into effect for the public. Some offered to give us the raw data. A few agencies even provided links.The transit agencies were very encouraging with our efforts. We did not get any resistance.
Did you have any kind of database software generating the site, or was it all created by hand?
Ray created special programs to take initially Word, then Excel, files and turn them into properly formatted plain text for the web. I am not a programmer, so I don’t know how these worked.Initially, I hand-typed schedules on Word. When I had access to Excel, I figured out a formula to calculate headways, and I could get done in minutes.
How closely did you work with the creators of the Bay Area TIP?
Ray lent his expertise to BATIP, and transplanted the idea to Southern California.
What finally caused SoCalTIP to shut down?
Ray’s full-time job as a programmer did not leave him much time to maintain SoCalTIP on the side. I did not know enough programming to maintain it on my own. Plus, the backlog became so large we probably would not have caught up, ever. This was before Wiki, which would have made SoCalTIP last longer.
Who knows, it may come back.
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:46 pm
As one of the other contributors of SoCalTIP (and the designer of the logo), my answer to whether SoCalTIP will come back is “not bloody likely”. The attempt at multi-agency coordination in the Bay Area’s 511 has not worked very well, and most transit agencies have capable people to put stuff on the web, whether they are employees, consultants, or employees of affiliated agencies (like their city IT department). Even the obscure agencies in Central California started putting stuff up on the web in 2002 or 2003. The main issue you are getting around is credibility from the public, which you are not going to get unless you get governmental sponsorship. SCAG, the only logical sponsor of such an endeavor (as AQMD doesn’t cover all of the urbanized Los Angeles area), is too impotent to do that. And people are used to using PDF schedules, and the original reason to use text only schedules (lynx and screenreaders) has died off now that the blind have PDF capable screen readers and dumb terminals are museum relics.
Typing schedules is very annoying and I tried OCR as much as possible, and got somewhere with the limited amount of scanner time I had at school. With the prevalence of OCR software, it should be easy for someone to cover the few agencies that do not have web presence, and link to the official agencies for the rest.
February 11th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
As a spectator I witnessed the birth and death of SOCALTIP. A few times I tried to generate publicity in hopes of helping them get more volunteers to do the tedious text creation. My greatest success was during one of the MTA strikes when I was able to get most of the media (local TV stations and the Times) to list the site as a source of alternative routing information. But the exposure led to no recruits to help upkeep and the poor thing eventually dwindled into oblivion.
A noble idea, and the demise was really not the fault of anyone. S*I*G*H*
February 12th, 2008 at 11:48 am
One further thought is to me one of the best uses of the net for propagating transportation information for our region today is the calendar attached to the Transit Advocates’ website [http://socata/calendar]. There are so many entities with meetings and events that occur that are informative that it is easy to lose track and can be vexing running to ground details. I and my fellow compilers try to include a wide variety of useful listings in the calendar whie not becoming too bogged down in clutter or excessive detail.
February 12th, 2008 at 11:49 am
UGH. I mean http://socata.net/calendar
February 12th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Actually, *I* designed the Socaltip logo….
I remember typing in a few of the schedules as well. Some of the simpler schedules (clockface) could be done by a short C program containing a couple of loops. It was the big MTA schedules that not only had frequent service, but running times that varied with traffic, that were a pain to type in…and keep updated.
Nowadays, just about every agency in the region has schedules on line, so there’s less of a need for Socaltip. I *would* like to have a page that lists streets names, and all of the buses that operate on that particular street, etc. Maybe someday….