First of all, the launch of the iPhone application store this July has led to unparalleled boom in the development of mobile client applications, including many more transit-related apps than ever before. I have a category for iPhone apps in the Headway Wiki, but new ones have been popping up faster than I can add them! A quick count shows about 100 transit-related apps in the U.S. store alone, mostly in the Navigation and Travel sections. The apps range from simple system map image browsers to apps that have full trip planners and real-time arrival estimates (particularly for systems that have opened up their data).

Why are we only seeing this rush now, when other kinds of smartphones have been around for the past 10 years or so? I think there are a few factors:

1. The iTunes application store makes it dramatically easier to buy and install applications than on any other smartphone, and it’s straightforward for a developer to post an app and get a 70% cut of whatever price they choose. In a way, Apple has done for mobile applications what they had already done for music downloads.
2. An iPhone app has several ways to determine where the user is, whether by GPS, Skyhook’s wi-fi base station database, or Google’s cell tower location system. This makes it possible for an app to automatically show the closest bus or subway station.
3. The iPhone and iPod Touch present a uniform platform, where every device has the same screen size, and every device has a data connection at least some of the time. This simplifies the task of designing an application.

These things combine to create an attractive situation for would-be developers of mobile transit applications, and so far, the market seems to be thriving. I’m particularly happy that it’s brought several active new faces to the Transit Developer community (and that several of the iPhone apps use public GTFS data feeds from agencies).

The other exciting development is one that I’m happy to have had a hand in: the addition of public transit and walking directions to the iPhone’s built-in Google Maps. It’s great to have public transportation as a first-class citizen of the iPhone, so that transit directions are just as easy to get as driving directions. Besides being incredibly convenient for regular riders like me, this has the potential to raise awareness of the transit option to people who might not have considered it before. I’ve been seeing a lot of great feedback to that effect on Twitter—here’s one example:

New subway and bus schedules in google maps on the iPhone = amazing. Just saved me a cab ride. –leemhoffman

Of course, iPhone Maps only gives transit directions in areas where the agency or operator has made their schedule data available to Google. This can lead to odd situations like the one in London, where Google Maps has commuter coach information from Traveline South East, but no information from Transport for London on the tube or the city buses. However, the list of covered regions continues to expand almost every week, as more agencies see the value of publishing their schedules for Google and other application developers to use.

What about the other smartphone platforms? Symbian, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile are all still quite viable, and I have no doubt that the success of Apple’s app store will spur the development of easier ways to create and distribute apps on those platforms. Hopefully this will expand the market for third-party transit apps there. (It’s also worth noting that they all have their own versions of Google Maps for mobile with public transit directions already.)

The new Android system isn’t available on many phones yet, but it does have a decent app store and standard location APIs, so I expect to see many more third-party transit apps there as the platform becomes more common. Unlike the iPhone, it also allows programs to run in the background while the user is doing other things, meaning that it’s possible to build applications that can monitor the progress of your bus or train and sound an alarm when it’s time to leave the house.

In any case, these are exciting times for the mobile phone market, and ultimately transit riders will continue to benefit by getting better information on the go.

At first, the map looks like your standard Google Maps transit mashup, albeit one with very nice custom tiles:

However, when you zoom in, you really start to see what a labor of love this has been for developer Will James and his collaborators:

The map has detailed underground footprints of every station in Manhattan and many in the other boroughs, complete with red staircase icons marking all the entrances. This information was collected by the community: according to Will, “visitors to the map have gone out and photographed many of the subway entrance and exit maps at the real stations and sent those in so I can illustrate them and include them on the map. The illustrating work for Manhattan was all done by Jared Schneidman who volunteered to do the work.”

But that’s not all: recently Will has integrated a wiki system for filling out station information like transfer information, service advisory links, and accessibility.

I’ve wanted to see something like this for a long time–it’s hard to manage this sort of metadata, so it’s great when motivated users can contribute or correct information based on their local knowledge. I’ve been watching the edits since the effort was announced last month, and there’s been a steady stream of improvements, mostly coming from Will and a couple other users. (It’s possible that the wiki syntax is a barrier to casual edits, or perhaps the feature isn’t visible enough yet on the site.)

onNYTurf’s map is so good that they’ve even syndicated it to a few other sites, including a bar guide and dance music event guide.

Keep up the good work, Will & co.!

See Also: onNYTurf entry in the Headway Wiki.

Clicking on that link allows you to see how you could make the same trip on public transportation (when possible), using the step-by-step instructions previously available on the standalone Google Transit site. For the first time, U.S. transit information is as easy to find as driving directions! Hopefully this will help inform people who had never realized that transit was a viable option for their trip.

Right now this works in the areas covered by Google Transit, and the team is working hard to add more transit systems of all sizes. If you work for an agency and you’d like to see your routes on Google Maps, send mail to labs-transit_content@google.com.

Being a structural system in its own right, a city can best be understood straightforwardly in its own terms, rather than in terms of some other kinds of organisms or objects. However, if the slippery shorthand of analogy can help, perhaps the best analogy is to imagine a large field in the darkness. In the field, many fires are burning. They are of many sizes, some great, others small; some far apart, others dotted close together; some are brightening, some are slowly going out. Each fire, large or small, extends it radiance into the surrounding murk, and thus it carves out a space. But the space and the shape of that space exist only to the extent that the light from the fire creates it.
[...]
These metaphoric space-defining fires are formed—to get back to tangible realities—by areas where diverse city uses and users give each other close-grained and lively support.

Ever since I read that, I’ve wanted to see a map based on this metaphor. It sounds an awful lot like a heatmap, like this map of rental prices:

or this map of how emotionally agitated people are as they walk through the area:

I’d really like a map of the vitality of an area, as expressed by how many people there tend to be walking around there. While we can’t track people directly (thank goodness), what we can do is find the businesses that motivate much of that pedestrian traffic. Here’s part of a map from the Not For Tourists Guide to San Francisco:

If you squint a little bit, you can almost see those fires that Jacobs was talking about. The areas with high concentrations of businesses and a tight street grid are often the same places that are the most pleasant to stroll through. (This is actually how I first figured out where I might want to live when I moved to SF.)

This brings us to Walk Score, a site that’s been getting a lot of attention in transit and urban planning circles in the past few weeks:

As you can see, they’ve managed to create an interactive version of the NFT amenity map. (It looks like they’re simply pinging Google Maps with searches for restaurants, coffee shops, bars, etc. and then plotting the results on the map.) But the brilliant part is that they’ve turned it into a sort of game by adding a score for any location you look up:

This small addition not only makes it fun to compulsively punch in the addresses for everywhere you’ve ever lived to see how they rate, but it also adds a competitive element. Look at how the post about it on LAist spawned a lively comment thread full of score comparisons.

In spite of the site’s shortcomings (including not taking transit connectivity into acount), this is still one of the most compelling new transit-related sites that I’ve seen this year. Now, if only someone would put together a heat map of walk scores, maybe we could finally see those fires that Jane saw…

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 not a bus stop? It can be hard for an agency with tens of thousands of individual stops to provide up-to-date map and schedule information at all of them. However, there are people who stand at each of those stops every day, who can notice if the schedule has gotten out of date, or if the map has faded to illegibility, and can post replacements.

Here’s how we could take this to the next level: First, create a web application that lets you find your stop, and then generates a printable PDF map and schedule tailored to that stop. (This photo from a Washington, DC shelter is a great example of stop specific-signage.) The schedule information is key, because “am I going to be standing here forever like a chump?” is usually the main question running through people’s heads when they’re standing at a bus stop. Second, add a measure of pride and accountability by putting the name of the person or organization maintaining that sign on the sign itself, as well as associated with the stop in the web app.

The biggest problem to solve is how to post signs securely and protect them against the elements. This is complicated by the wide variety of bus stops—some might be marked on city-owned poles, some might be agency-owned signposts, and some might be bus shelters that are owned by media companies like Clear Channel! For their part, SeptaMadeBetter recommends covering the printed pages with clear tape or laminating them before posting them. I wonder what other low-cost/low-hassle mounting solutions people could use: a more constructive version of postal label graffiti? Cable ties in service of transit?

Fortunately, some agencies are already encouraging this type of community involvement. A search for “adopt a bus stop” turns up many programs, mostly aimed at cleaning up litter around bus stops. And Bewdley in the UK has (or had?) a program to keep schedules current using volunteer effort. Still, I think this is an area with a lot of untapped potential for forward-looking transit agencies and community-minded riders.

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 bus and rail stops are located. You can click on these icons to see which routes stop there, and if the agency has provided its schedule information in Google Transit Feed Spec form, you can see the next scheduled departures for that stop right in the bubble!

The other feature that will be of interest to transit riders is the new “Street View” feature, which lets you “travel” up and down some streets on the map, getting panoramic views of the surroundings all the while:

As you can see here, this feature can be handy for figuring out exactly where the bus stops are in relation to nearby landmarks. The image depicts a typical San Francisco Muni bus stop, indicated only by a stripe of yellow paint on a light pole (if you zoom in on this street view, you can almost read the route numbers that serve the stop). If you had been given directions to get on or off at this stop, Street View would allow you to figure out that you should look for the “Me Lindo Peru” restaurant as a landmark. (Beyond its usefulness, Street View is plain fun to play around with, especially using the arrow keys to pan and move.)

Both features are available in a limited number of cities right now, but you can expect them to spread to more areas as time goes on. (Disclaimer: I had a minor involvement in the new transit icons, and I, er, enjoyed playing with internal betas of Street View.)