Author Archive
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Goings-on: Transit Developers and WhereCamp
I’ve been busy working on some things that I hope to be able to share with you all soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to mention a few things:
Transit Developers is a discussion group for people who build transit applications, whether independently, or working for transit agencies. If that sounds like you, I [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Events by Joe Hughes
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
TransitCampBayArea report
Since I’ve seen surprisingly few wrapup posts about it (only Tara’s and Alexa’s), I’ll go ahead and say that last month’s TransitCampBayArea event was a real treat, surpassing the expectations of pretty much everyone that I talked to. Here are some of my highlights from the event:
• Mike Smith, Director of Engineering at NextBus, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Events, San Francisco, Transit Camp by Joe Hughes
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Landmark talk on data sharing by TriMet’s Tim McHugh
Update (3/5/08): TriMet sent me an updated version of the presentation; I’ve updated the version embedded on this page, or you can download the PDF.
Earlier today at the APTA TransITech conference, TriMet’s Tim McHugh gave a heartening talk about their experiences with making their raw schedules and and real-time information available to developers. Here [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Data Sharing, Events, Google Transit Feed Spec, Open Source, Portland by Joe Hughes
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
TransitCamp
Those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend should check out TransitCampBayArea, this Saturday and Sunday in Palo Alto. Following in the footsteps of similar events in Toronto and Vancouver, TransitCampBayArea is a “solutions playground” where the emphasis will be on how citizens can help improve the transit experience in the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Events, San Francisco, Transit Camp by Joe Hughes
Monday, January 28th, 2008
SoCalTIP, an early citizen-run transit site
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 [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in History, Schedules by Joe Hughes
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
onNYTurf Subway Map
Of the 74 third-party transit sites collected in the Headway Wiki, one of the ones that I’ve been most impressed with is the onNYTurf Subway Map. This donation-supported mapping project, associated with NY blog/discussion site onNYTurf, covers rail and ferry lines in the New York metropolitan area.
At first, the map looks like your standard [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Maps, New York by Joe Hughes
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
Blog Recommendation: Permanent Campaigns Consulting
If you’re interested in simple ideas that can improve the transit experience (likely if you’re reading Headway), the Permanent Campaigns Consulting blog is a great resource. Permanent Campaigns’ business is helping agencies communicate better with their riders (with the intent of increasing ridership), and their keen understanding of the landscape shows through in their [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Blogroll by Joe Hughes
Friday, November 16th, 2007
Using Google transit routing on the iPhone
As some people have noticed, right now it’s hard to get transit routing from Google Maps on iPhones, because Apple’s software grabs most Google Maps URLs and sends them to the built in Maps application. This situation will no doubt be improved in the future, but in the meantime, here’s a workaround.
To get Google [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in Google Transit, Mobile by Joe Hughes
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Transit stops on your GPS
One of the biggest benefits of transit agencies making their raw schedule data publicly available, as TriMet and others have done, is that riders are free to do interesting things with the information that the agency itself might not have thought of or have taken the time to do themselves.
Case in point: Brett Warden in [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Data Sharing, Google Transit Feed Spec, Mobile, Portland by Joe Hughes
Saturday, November 10th, 2007
Idea: Smooth ride incentives for drivers
One of the reasons why buses are sometimes less pleasant to ride than trains is that they’re much more likely to offer a jerky ride. This probably has a lot to do with the traction afforded by rubber tires and the unpredictability of the street traffic that buses travel in. Either way, when [...]