Author Archive
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: [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in Mobile by Joe Hughes
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 improvements in [...]
Comments Off - 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 [...]
Comments Off - 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 agencies [...]
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 [...]
2 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 [...]