Headway

This past weekend, I had a little bit of time to work on a hobby project:

This is my Sony Ericsson MBW-150 bluetooth watch, showing the next few SF Muni bus arrival times for a nearby stop. The code to fetch the arrival times is running on my Droid phone, and communicating with the watch using Marcel Dopita’s OpenWatch software for the Android platform.

Using a secondary display like a watch could allow a rider to keep tabs on when their bus is coming without constantly having to take their phone out of their pocket and unlock its display—particularly nice if it’s cold enough and they’re wearing gloves.

It’s also worth mentioning that a few months ago, I wouldn’t have been blogging about this. On November 7, the San Francisco MTA finally gave formal permission to developers to build apps using their realtime arrival data. Prior to that, developers who spoke publicly about their experiments with the Muni realtime data risked threats from a company that claimed a contractual right to charge for access to the arrival data for Muni’s vehicles. People were still building interesting things, but because of these chilling effects, no one outside of their circle of trusted friends would ever know about them.

Moral of the story for agencies: if you want to encourage innovative realtime transit apps in your city, read your contracts carefully, and insist on the right to provide realtime data about your vehicles to creative and energetic developers. You’ll be in good company, alongside the Chicago’s CTA, San Francisco’s Muni and BART, Boston’s MBTA, and Portland’s TriMet.

Note: this post was updated to replace the original image with an improved one on December 18, 2009.

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 you’re on a sideways-facing hard plastic seat, or standing on a crowded vehicle without a convenient handhold, the net effect is that you might become better acquainted with your fellow riders than you’d like.

While some of the jerkiness can no doubt be chalked up to the vehicle, in my experience some drivers definitely have a lighter touch than others. Why not reward the attention paid by a conscientious driver to the quality of the ride? A simple accelerometer in the AVL package would likely be enough to figure out who was doing a good job. (There’s at least one company, Road Safety, selling this type of hardware for first-responder, commercial fleet, and of course anxious parent applications.)

Rather than using this system to punish careless drivers, it’d be be better (if more costly) to offer incentives for a driver to opt into, and perform well in, this type of monitoring. In some ways, this would be similar to the pilot programs that Progressive Insurance has run in which private drivers can choose to have their driving behavior recorded in exchange for reduced insurance charges. This way, it can preserve driver dignity at the same time that the smoother rides improve rider dignity.

Steve Offut over at CommuterPageBlog posted about how transit systems could benefit from more memorable route names:

I’ll bet you there isn’t a single rider who can explain why those buses are called #2, why there are 6 different ones, why those particular letters of the alphabet are used, and why the 2W and 2T are somehow paired with the other 2′s. The numbering is worthless to the rider (who is, after all, the customer). So here’s a system that not only provides zero useful information but actually provides the disservice of confusing customers.

He points to Boulder’s named bus routes as one alternative:

Many of the buses have names: Hop, Skip, Stampede, Bolt, Dash, etc. The more complete names are things like “Skip Along Broadway” and “Dash down South Boulder Road.” Now that’s useful info to a customer.

It’s true that virtually no one knows the arcane numbering system for their city. On the other hand, the picture at the top of Steve’s post demonstrates the wayfinding advantage of numbers: they’re short, so they can be shown in huge type on stops and vehicle headsigns. There’s no reason you couldn’t use similarly short route names using letters, though.

For example, the RER commuter trains in Paris have four-letter names like PUMA and MONA that indicate the stops that a train is serving:

(photo courtesy Barbara Smith)

To be confident that they’re on the right vehicle on an unfamiliar route, a rider generally needs to check two things: the short name (by looking at the headsign) and the direction (from the headsign or by asking the driver “are you going to X?”). Given this, the short name has to be different from the names of places that the route serves, to avoid confusion between multiple routes operating in the same area. (The Boulder and Paris systems both have this property.)

Given sufficient care in picking the names, I think this has great potential. Cheers to Steve for questioning something that we’ve taken for granted for so long!