Headway

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 encourage you to sign up and post about what you’ve been working on.

WhereCamp is an annual get-together for developers of geographical applications, and a good place to swap tips and meet other folks with big ideas. This year it’s happening this weekend (May 17-18, 2008) on the Google campus in Mountain View, CA. I know that there will be several people who work in the transit field there, including Bibiana McHugh and Mike Gilligan from TriMet and Aaron Antrim from Trillium. I hope to see more of you there!

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, urging transit developers and riders to rise up and demand a bus-tracking API from NextBus and its client agencies. What are we waiting for?

• Seeing so many local agency folks realize how they could make good use of the energy and ideas of indie transit developers, simply by being willing to talk to them (rather than reflexively trying to shut them down).

• On the flip side, seeing transit hackers and activists learn about the challenges and constraints that the agencies are fighting as they try to offer better service.

• Having the chance to give a talk with Chris Messina and Bryce Nesbitt about transit mashups from both inside and outside agencies. As the first morning progressed, we realized that our planned talks all worked into the same message, so we rejiggered things so that my lightning tour of the third-party sites on the wiki led right into Chris’s story of how IamCaltrain got built in 24 hours, into Bryce’s point that even more things would get built if more transit agencies would share their information with developers in a reusable format.

• Seeing people brainstorm cost-effective ideas to help agencies with their problems (like getting local design schools to help improve BART signage).

• Hearing that the MTC was planning to provide a feed of regional schedule data in machine-readable format.

• Working with a mix of hackers and agency folks on a lightweight transit service alert (micro?)format. Bryce set up a group to continue the discussion.

• Getting to meet so many progressive-minded agency folks and transportation hackers, some of whom I only knew from email (like Aaron Antrim), and others that I was meeting for the first time (like Mark Simon and Logan Green). The event was such a blur that I wish I had gotten more cards. Don’t hesitate to shoot me an email!

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 are the slides:

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Since you don’t get to hear the spoken half of the talk, here are a few points that he made that aren’t in the slides:

• Riders always want more ways of accessing transit information, but TriMet has limited development cycles; releasing schedule feeds and APIs is way to allow outside developers to close the gap.
• Chances are, outside developers are already scraping your transit site anyway, so why not give them a less error-prone direct feed of the information?
• In the future, they plan to release an API to their trip planner.
• Since they’ve launched their developer site, they’ve only received positive feedback on the resources; there’s been no negative impact on them from doing this!

The significance of this talk lay partly in the audience of technical staff from other agencies and transit vendors–this is the strongest endorsement that I’ve ever seen from an agency of the virtues of working with outside developers. In time, I hope that stories like TriMet’s will convince other agencies that they have much more to gain than they have to lose by sharing their data.

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 Bay Area via hands-on creative work. (In short, the kind of thing that I love to cover in this blog.)

Saturday is structured with pre-planned talks to help bridge the gap between the transit agency and web 2.0 worlds (I’ll be giving a talk about mashups from both inside and outside of agencies). Sunday will be the traditional self-organizing BarCamp day–any participant can sign up that morning to give a talk.

I’m hoping that this will be a good chance to meet more of the local transit hackers (and agency staff) in person. If you’re going to be there (or at this week’s APTA TransITech conference in Anaheim), drop me a line!

Last week I embarked on a whirlwind tour of Vancouver to help announce the the addition of TransLink routing to Google Maps. It was fun to get a chance to see the town for the first time (on Halloween night no less—the apparent Canadian tradition of setting off small fireworks on that night made things unexpectly lively). It’s a dramatic town, nudged into a healthy density by the surrounding mountains, which no doubt helps explain the towers springing up everywhere like so many glass saplings.

I really enjoyed the chance to meet some of the local transit bloggers like Richard Eriksson, Karen Quinn (ringleader of the upcoming Vancouver Transit Camp), and Paul Hillsdon. (Sadly, esteemed planning guru Gordon Price didn’t stick around to say hi, though he made up for it by providing a good transcript of my “giant crab” demo.)

(Public service announcement: bloggers, please put an email address somewhere on your site! There have been at least a few cases lately where I wanted to invite people to upcoming events but I couldn’t find a way to contact them privately.)

I also had the opportunity to sit down with a bunch of TransLink folks. Thanks to Bob, Brian, Cam, Dan, Gerry, Janet, Kirsten, and Patricia for taking the time to tell me about the things that they’re working on and the ambitious things they’d like to do in the future to encourage more ridership and to improve the rider experience. People seem to fixate on the negatives of their local transit agencies, but from my experience there are plenty of sharp people in every agency who are passionate about making things better, and from what I’ve seen TransLink is no exception. I hope that some of the ideas I heard from them will come to fruition!

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 and their riders (fortuitously, Stella Wotherspoon from the MTC was in the audience). Other highlights:

• Greg Sadetsky’s work with Poly9 in aggregating transit schedule data (some of it hard-won through Canadian FOIAs).
• OpenStreetMaps’s progress in building unencumbered maps of the U.K. (and other sundry areas) through user data contributions. They’re still lacking in U.S. coverage, but it seemed like a cabal was forming to help out with that during the unconference.
• Dennis Crowley’s talk about his experiments in GPS/SMS-enabled ski slope gaming, and seeing a mockup of Plundr on a DS Lite.

Even though I won’t make it back for the second day, it was well worth the trek down to the valley. Thanks to Anselm and the others who helped put this event together!