Headway

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!

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!

When I first read Jane Jacobs’s seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, this passage resonated with me:

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…

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 Muni and Portland Streetcar, but I assume that it could easily be adapted to any of the many systems that use NextBus for vehicle tracking. I really like MuniTime; my main wish-list item for them is an easy way to bookmark a particular stop, so that I can easily jump to the right one as I’m roaming around town.

Also, this weekend I threw together iNextMuni, a version of the NextMuni mobile site that has a more iPhone-like style. This was mostly an excuse for me to play around with Joe Hewitt’s iUI interface library, but maybe some of you will find it useful.

Have you come across (or built!) other iPhone-optimized transit applications? Let me know in the comments!

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 awry. The example above shows how a detour for a street fair was handled. Neat!

Incidentally, since SFist doesn’t seem to offer a syndication feed for just their MUNI category, I threw one together using Pipes:

SFist MUNI Category RSS feed