Streetsblog New York City

Citi Bike membership (in blue), trips (in yellow), and miles traveled (in red). Image: Antonio D’souza

Citi Bike is on pace to surpass 40,000 annual members sometime today, and users had made more than 212,000 trips between the Memorial Day launch and yesterday at 5 p.m. These numbers, reported daily on the Citi Bike website, have provided a continuous source of data that Google software engineer Antonio D’souza has charted to illustrate the program’s growth.

Meanwhile, Citi Bike’s software problems have also provided an impetus to build new tools. By flagging stations that have not had activity for three or more daytime hours, WNYC created a map that identifies stations which may currently be inoperable. A glance at the map this afternoon indicates that very few stations are reporting a “flatline.” Of the handful that haven’t seen recent activity, almost all are at the periphery of the system, where they may simply not get much use.

Eventually, Citi Bike is scheduled to create a data portal on its website, similar to the open data page for Capital Bikeshare in Washington, DC. For those looking to learn more about working with Citi Bike data, OpenPlans (Streetsblog’s parent organization) is hosting a Citi Bike data night on June 26, where developers will be able to hear from NYC DOT Director of Web and New Media Neil Freeman and demo their apps using Citi Bike data.

As we reported last week, the new Apple mobile operating system, iOS 6, will come with a new, Apple-designed Maps application that eschews Google’s mapping tools and comes without standard transit directions. The Apple Maps app will provide driving and walking directions, but transit riders will have to access third-party plug-ins to figure out the best way from point A to point B.

Will smaller software developers create better transit apps for iPhone than Google? Image: Headway Blog

While that could pose a hurdle for millions of iPhone and iPad users, the new system could also encourage the creation of a much richer assortment of transit apps for mobile devices, according to Kevin Webb, who develops mapping and trip planning tools at OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization.

In a recent post on the OpenPlans blog, Webb credits Google for working with transit agencies to share their data in a way that developers can easily use to build applications. But he says that Google had little incentive to devote more resources to its transit apps, and that the ubiquity of Google Maps was suffocating innovation from other developers:

One possible reason is that Google’s free tools de-incentivize others from entering the market. iPhone and Android users have had little reason to download alternate apps, especially paid ones, when the pre-installed features solve much of the need. Unlike many other Google technologies, there’s no current option to extend the functionality for transit or other directions, or incorporate this data into non-Google apps…

There’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in how we design and communicate information about personal mobility. Unfortunately the tools have not kept pace, in part due to a lack of proper incentives for new services. With iOS 6, Apple is building a market for new tools rather than offering a default solution.

Will iOS 6 result in a renaissance of innovation around transit data and improve convenience for transit riders? We’ll see.

Martin Kelly Jones sued the MBTA for providing Boston bus riders with real-time arrival information. Photo: MBTA

Lloyd Dobbler, John Cusack’s generation-defining character in Say Anything, notably said, “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career.”

Martin Kelly Jones lives by a similar creed. He doesn’t make or sell anything. Instead he makes his living by attacking transit agencies for using real-time tracking technologies that he says he owns. It’s a practice known as “patent trolling.” Lloyd Dobbler probably wouldn’t want to be a patent troll either, but Jones has made it into his entire career.

Jones filed his first transit-related patent in 1993, securing rights to the idea of letting parents know when school buses were running late. More than 30 additional patents of similar ideas followed.

Jones doesn’t develop or sell any technology relating to real-time vehicle tracking, but that hasn’t stopped him (and his two offshore firms, ArrivalStar and Melvino Technologies) from punishing anyone who does. To date, he’s filed more than 100 lawsuits against anyone who uses such technology – everyone from Ford to Abercrombie & Fitch to American Airlines to FedEx. He’s one of the top 25 filers of patent infringement suits according to a database maintained by the patent tracking site PriorSmart.com.

Lately, Jones has focused his litigious impulse on transit agencies around the country. According to a brief by the Georgetown Climate Center, “ArrivalStar has brought suit against at least ten transit entities, and at least eight more have received demand letters.” GCC, which convenes the Transportation Climate Initiative, worries that the suits can create a chilling effect, discouraging agencies from employing vehicle tracking technologies. Providing real-time bus arrival information has been shown to increase ridership [PDF], taking cars off the road and reducing vehicle emissions.

Jones’ strategy is not to sue transit agencies for all they’re worth, but to offer them a relatively low-cost way to keep these cases out of court. In fact, not one of his lawsuits has gone all the way through trial. They always end up settling, usually for $50,000 to $75,000, though the demands can go as high as $200,000.

“That’s $75,000 of taxpayer money that’s going into ArrivalStar’s pockets without the validity of the patent ever being challenged,” said attorney Babak Siavoshy, who represents the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If they make the settlement amount low enough, where the costs and benefits favor settling, then most municipalities are going to settle, and it costs them a lot of money, because the cost of litigation is a big stick.”

Read more…

Earlier today we brought you a story about a new and potentially dangerous technological innovation – Facebook in cars. To help end the week on a higher note, here’s some far more encouraging news on the transportation tech front.

A challenge to app developers aims to help this Boston bike-sharer plan his route, especially if it's lunch time. Photo: The Fosbury Flop

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in issuing a challenge to software developers: Create three new programs that combine real-time transit, bike-sharing, and even food truck data, in order to demonstrate how transit and bike-sharing complement each other.

Boston rolled out their new 60-station, 600-cycle bike-sharing system, called Hubway and sponsored by shoe maker New Balance, last July. It has been so successful — logging 140,000 trips in just four months — that Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is overseeing its expansion to 90 stations and 900 bikes starting next year. But in addition to upping the number of bikes, Boston hopes to make Hubway more useful to its customers in other ways.

The MBTA/MassDOT challenge is really three separate challenges:

• A software application that combines transit schedules and real-time Hubway bike availability to display possible connections between the two modes;
• A visualization of “A day in the Life” of Boston’s transit and bike-sharing systems, possibly along the lines of what Oliver O’Brien has done for London; and, as a bonus,
• The BLT (Bikes, Lunch, & T) Challenge, with the goal of helping “residents and visitors learn about and get to Boston’s food trucks.”

The winners of the first two challenges will each receive a year-long transit pass and a year-long membership to Hubway; all three challenge winners will receive a free pass to area food truck festivals.

Read more…

Earlier this week, in a forum about intelligent cities and the ways data can improve urban planning, Carolyn Young of Portland’s TriMet let it slip that Portland was one of the first cities to share its real-time transit tracking data on Google Maps. (Google announced the news two days later.)

Google's MBTA trip planner now includes real-time data for Boston's buses, not just schedules.

For transit agencies, letting Google provide useful transit data to their customers (and the bazillions of other people who log on to Google every day) seems to be a win-win situation, but Young observed that not all agencies feel that way. “There are a lot of barriers,” she said. “Some think, ‘It’s our data, we don’t want to give it to anybody, maybe we can make money with it.’”

Boston’s MBTA has a different perspective on data-sharing. The agency doesn’t even show real-time tracking on its website – instead it links to an App Showcase of third-party software developers that have created tracking tools on their own.

“We believe very strongly that not only can working with third party developers get information to our riders more quickly, it helps us do it more innovatively, and at a lower cost,” MBTA’s Joshua Robin told Streetsblog. “We started releasing real-time bus information as a pilot back in November of 2009 as part of this big developer conference we had. The first application was developed within an hour. No application developed by a transit agency is going to come out that quickly. You wouldn’t even be in the first stage of any kind of procurement by then.”

There are now more than 30 third-party apps that connect T riders with real-time tracking data – all at no cost to the MBTA. Robin says people almost always get traffic and weather information from a third party like news radio. He sees transit data the same way.

Read more…

Surveys show how few people in Jackson Heights got there by driving. In every neighborhood DOT studied, a substantial majority of people arrived by means other than driving.

NYCDOT’s annual scorecard, the Sustainable Streets Index, adds more information about how New Yorkers get around every year. In addition to regular statistical snapshots of the city’s transportation system, like transit ridership or traffic speeds culled from GPS devices in taxis, this year’s version adds neighborhood travel profiles. Compiled from interviews in eight neighborhoods, these profiles to show just how little New Yorkers rely on cars to get around.

The recent news is not good, however. In 2009, the decade-long trend toward greater transit use reversed slightly, according to the report. Motor vehicle traffic increased by 0.3 percent while transit ridership fell 2.5 percent. DOT attributed the change to the effects of the recession, increased transit fares, and lower gas prices.

The number of transit riders declined in 2009, while traffic rose slightly. Preliminary numbers show subway ridership rebounded in 2010 while bus ridership continued to fall.

Preliminary 2010 numbers show what appear to be the joint effect of the uneven economic recovery and last year’s devastating fare hikes and service cuts. Subway ridership bounced back by one or two percent through October, but bus ridership continued to fall.

While the report is almost entirely a data-driven look backward, with regards to transit ridership it offers a dark warning about future trends:

The big if, however, lies in the area of overall bus and subway service. Given continued State budget shortfalls and pressures on the MTA budget, it is unclear whether the recent pattern of MTA service cuts and fare increases can be broken. In addition, the current MTA Capital Program remains only partially funded. Without firmer financing of the city’s transit system, the gains of the past decade are clearly at risk.

A new feature of the Sustainable Streets Index, the neighborhood travel profiles, offers in-depth looks at how people arrived at eight city neighborhoods and why they went there. In Union Square, for example, only four percent arrived by driving, along with another five percent in taxis. In contrast, roughly half of all people walked there and a third took the subway. Another four percent rode the bus and two percent biked.

Given that 70 percent of the people surveyed were there to shop or eat out, it’s safe to say that making parking more abundant isn’t the key to helping businesses in Union Square prosper. Similar data compiled on other commercial strips could help assuage many merchant concerns about re-appropriating parking spaces for busways, bike lanes, or pedestrian improvements.

In neighborhoods across the city, only a small share of people drive to their destinations. In Jackson Heights, only six percent of interview subjects had driven there, while 65 percent walked. At Fordham, only eight percent had driven, while the largest number — 42 percent — had taken the bus.

Read more…

At 5:19 p.m. today, the MTA's new BusTime system showed that B63 buses were approaching 86th Street in both directions.

From the Verrazano to Brooklyn Heights, passengers on the B63 can now make their rides more predictable. As of today, the MTA has launched a new bus tracking system that enables riders to find the location of every bus on the route either online or by text message. For riders who can send texts or check the internet from their phones, there’s much less guesswork involved in determining, for instance, whether it will be faster to walk.

If the tracking system, which was developed as a low-cost, in-house solution, turns out to be a success, it will be expanded to the entire bus network on Staten Island as early as this year.

Until today, the only real-time bus info available to New York City riders was along 34th Street. As Ben Kabak explains, that system is proprietary and expanding it would lock the MTA into another inflexible, unaffordable contract.

The B63 tracking system, in contrast, was developed using an open-source model in collaboration with OpenPlans, Streetsblog’s parent organization. It collects data with onboard GPS devices, then analyzes and improves the data before publishing the bus locations.

Currently, the system can only calculate the distance between a bus and a given location, not the time until a bus arrives. To help speed the development of that functionality (and save money), the MTA is making all the bus location information open to the public. Any enterprising developer can enter the fray and create the algorithm that will help bring real-time bus arrival information to New Yorkers.

One of the encouraging trends for American transit riders, in an otherwise bleak landscape of service cuts and fare hikes, is the growing number of agencies experimenting with ways to bring better information to their customers. Last summer Streetfilms explored how open transit data is helping to make riding the bus or the train more convenient in several cities.

Today’s follow-up looks at how better transit data is benefiting riders in Chicago. The Chicago Transit Authority’s “Bus Tracker” system is taking the mystery out of waiting for the bus, providing close-to-real-time information about when the next bus is coming. Riders can access this information online, on their mobile devices, and, in the Wicker Park-Bucktown district, in several cafes and shops.

This is just too cool. At Rail-volution, Chris Smith from Portland Transport debuted what he is calling the world’s first “Transit Appliance.” It can deliver real-time transit arrival estimates to a display in your home, coffee shop, library or, well, anywhere frequented by transit users.

Drawing upon a number of open source software components, the open hardware “Chumby” platform, and publicly available transit data from Portland’s TriMet & NextBus, a successfully hacked device can transmit arrival times to transit riders wherever they may be.

Chris says that the appliance can be delivered for less than $200 and works anywhere a WiFi connection is available. For more info contact him directly at chris [at] portlandtransport [dot] com.

The location of M16 and M34 buses on 34th Street at 12:17 p.m. today. Image: MTA BusTime.

Since last August, New Yorkers waiting for a bus on 34th Street have been able to check electronic signs at bus stops to find out how long it will take for the next oneto arrive. As of yesterday, they don’t even need to head to the bus stop. Riders can see the real-time location of every M16 and M34 bus on their computer or smartphone or track the buses via text message.

That means someone can decide to finish her coffee in the Herald Square pedestrian plaza before heading to catch the bus, or decide it’ll be faster to walk a couple of blocks than wait for the bus to arrive. Eliminating both the wait itself and the uncertainty about the wait will make riding the bus that much more pleasant and attractive.

The service, named BusTime, was developed by the firm Clever Devices, which also made a very similar website for the entire Chicago bus system. The cost of the Chicago contract came out to $24 million.

The MTA’s goal is ultimately to provide real-time information to riders on the entire system, said MTA spokesperson Kevin Ortiz. For now, the MTA will be observing and evaluating the BusTime system, which is only a pilot, and will consider all options for how to expand real-time info.

The one-year tenure of Jay Walder as MTA chief has been marked by a noticeable improvement in the amount of information available to MTA riders. Around 100 countdown clocks have been installed in the subway system, according to Second Avenue Sagas, and now the MTA is beginning to install snazzy screens outside major stations to inform riders about delays and service changes before they pay a fare.

Walder has also opened up the MTA’s transit data to software developers, allowing them to create their own tools for transit riders — a decision that should accelerate the roll-out of real-time bus info from 34th Street to other routes. At a conference this May, Walder explained that the agency will be counting on developers to deliver bus tracking information to riders.