Streetsblog New York City

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.

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.

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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.)

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

One of the simplest and best tools for promoting walkable development has branched out into the full range of car-free transportation. Walk Score, the website which measures how many neighborhood amenities are within walking distance of a given location, has added a wealth of information about other forms of travel, including transit and cycling. The improved Walk Score provides a more complete sense of what is accessible from your apartment or workplace. 

Like the original Walk Score tool, the Transit Score feature computes a rating based on a 100-point scale. It's available for locations in the more than 30 cities that have released their transit data for the program. A location gets points for being closer to transit stops. More frequent service counts more in the algorithm, as does rail service compared to bus transit.

A second tool allows you to enter two locations and see what your commute would look like across all modes. The data is the same as you'd find on Google Maps, but displayed in a side-by-side comparison that makes it easier to see the differences between modes. One bonus feature: a graph showing the change in elevation along your route in each mode, allowing you to see the hills you'd negotiate while walking or biking.

According to Walk Score's Chief Technology Officer Matt Lerner, those two tools will help users learn something fundamental about their prospective neighborhood: how they're likely to get around. It helps people answer the question, "If I move to this house, will I start driving everywhere, or will I get transit as an option?" he said.

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Ever find yourself waiting for the next bus, not knowing when it will arrive? Think it would be great if you could check a subway countdown clock from the sidewalk? Or get arrival times on your phone? Giving transit riders better information can make riding the bus or the train more convenient and appealing. And transit agencies are finding that the easiest and least expensive way to do it is by opening data about routes, schedules, and real-time locations to software developers, instead of guarding it like a proprietary secret.

I recently got the chance to dive into the topic of open data with my colleagues at OpenPlans. We went up to Boston to see what transit riders got out of the state transportation department's decision to open up its data. We also talked to New York MTA Chair Jay Walder, City Council Member Gale Brewer, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase, and Transportation Alternatives director Paul Steely White to paint a full picture of what it would mean if cities shared their transit and transportation data. The information is there, waiting to be put to use to help people plan transit trips, waste less gas driving, or make their streets safer.

At a conference at Google's Chelsea office last night, MTA Chair Walder said all the right things about working collaboratively with software developers, confirming the agency's dramatic turnaround on open transit data.

After a longstanding policy of keeping a tight lid on route and schedule information, the MTA reversed course earlier this year and began opening data to developers. The new policy promises to improve the rider experience by putting better information at their fingertips. A closer working relationship between the MTA and developers should bring New Yorkers closer to the day when they can, for instance, find out when the next bus or train is coming by checking their phones.

Last night was a chance for both parties to get to know each other, although Walder was the one with something to prove, reassuring developers that the MTA's new position is for real. "If we can harness the power in this room, we’ll be a heck of a lot better than if we’re doing this ourselves," he said. "Getting information to people in a way that no longer treats our transit system as a black hole will be transformative."

One of the more interesting exchanges came when Nick Grossman of OpenPlans (Streetsblog's parent company) asked Walder about the MTA's wishlist from the developer community. Here's a rundown of the three most important ways Walder believes developers can help the MTA and improve the rider experience.

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