Author Archive
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 [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Events by Joe Hughes
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Finding bus stops with new Google Maps features
As part of their Where 2.0 blitz, the Google Maps folks have just released a couple new features that make it easier to find out more about local transit stops.
The first is clickable transit icons on the map:
When you zoom close enough into areas with transit coverage, you’ll see icons on the map showing where [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Google Transit Feed Spec, Maps by Joe Hughes
Friday, March 2nd, 2007
Google Transit Feed Spec update for February 2007
Google Transit recently updated their open feed specification for exchanging transit data, and since I helped with a few of the revisions, I thought I’d summarize what’s new:
Headway-based schedule support
The new frequencies.txt file allows you to specify that a bus or train trip happens every 10 minutes, rather than listing out exact times for each [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Google Transit Feed Spec by Joe Hughes
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
TriMet’s open source TimeTable Publisher
One of the most exciting talks that I saw at last week’s APTA TransITech conference was Frank Purcell of TriMet’s talk about TimeTable Publisher. (I don’t have a link for that presentation yet, but here’s a PDF of his talk at GOSCON 2006.)
TimeTable Publisher is an application that TriMet developed in-house for turning their [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in Google Transit Feed Spec, Open Source, Portland by Joe Hughes
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
QuizNight.net Google Transit directions mashup
A Seattle-based pub trivia site just added a nifty transit directions feature to their site, combining their own location database with Google Transit’s Seattle routing. To see an example:
View one of their venue pages, such as The Great Nabob.
Enter a Seattle address into the “Current location:” box in the upper-right part of the page [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Google Transit, Seattle by Joe Hughes
Sunday, February 11th, 2007
What is Headway?
The word headway is public transit jargon for “the time between buses or trains on the same line”. You could say that it’s the pulse of a transit route.
Headway, this blog, is about improving public transportation. While the most obvious way to improve transit is to provide more of it, that’s an undertaking [...]