Despite advice to the contrary from OC Transpo (ON) general manager Alain Mercier, a group of Ottawa transit commissioners is ready to recommend releasing the agency’s bus-location data as soon as possible. Councillor Tim Tierney, who leads a working group of commissioners and senior staff, told the Ottawa Citizen that he plans to add the item to agenda for a special transit commission meeting on Thursday. General city policy calls for releasing its data, but OC Transpo has waffled on the issue. Most recently, Mercier told the commission that OC Transpo would incur costs by sharing its data — either the costs of training third parties to use the data or advertising and sponsorship revenues forgone. Should the council recommend releasing the transit data, the city can make the bus-location files available in about two months. Link to full story in Ottawa Citizen.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has taken some of the mystery out of ground transportation at Logan International Airport. A new LED sign will count down the minutes until the MBTA’s Silver Line bus rapid transit service arrives at Terminal C, with signs to be installed at other terminals eventually. The sign was inspired by an MBTA employee who saw a similar display at the Philadelphia (PA) airport; according to The Boston Globe, the sign is “only loosely related” to the MBTA’s other real-time information activities. The hope is that countdown signs will remove some of the confusion about the Silver Line service and encourage more travelers to choose transit over taxis. “Having used it myself, frankly, in the past, it can be a mystery,” said MassDOT secretary and former MBTA general manager Richard A. Davey about the Silver Line service. “And I ran the T.” Link to full story in The Boston Globe.
When something goes wrong on transit, some riders automatically reach for their smart phones and share information — and frustration — via Twitter. They are less likely to comment when things go right. So when researchers at Purdue University (IN) tapped into Twitter to test the mood of Chicago commuters, they found that complaints outnumbered compliments. Using the market research tool of sentiment analysis, Craig Collins, Samiul Hasan, and Satish Ukkusuri collected tweets from Chicago Transit Authority (IL) riders and looked for patterns. Tweets were cleaned, sorted, analyzed, and ranked from negative (-5) to positive (+5). The analysis, which covered tweets from last summer (which was before CTA started tweeting), yielded 298 positive posts and 465 negative ones. The Atlantic Cities writes about Hasan’s presentation of these findings Tuesday at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. Saying that the analysis showed limited positive sentiment, Hasan suggested that no news is good news. “The most interesting thing we found is that transit riders do not give any positive sentiment at a particular time. They only give negative sentiment,” he said. “But that’s not very disappointing because we found that the lack of negative sentiment is basically what transit authorities should look for. If there’s no negative sentiment at any given time, that means that things are running smoothly.” (Full disclosure: I was part of the same session, presenting the findings from my recently completed, but unpublished, TCRP synthesis on public transportation and social media.) Link to full story in The Atlantic Cities.
Fast Company’s Co.Design asks an interesting question: Can Twitter help planners create better transit routes? Enter Eric Fischer, who used Twitter’s API to collect geotagged tweets and map them onto the streets of New York City, Chicago (IL), and the San Francisco Bay (CA) area. The maps show how people travel around cities, or at least how tech-savvy people with smart phones choose to get around. Co.Design writes:
Fischer’s maps are yet another example of the kind of powerful information that networked, ubiquitous sensors can provide. The MTA in New York City is spending billions of dollars to expand its mass transit system; how might a map like Fischer’s inform decisions on where, when, and how to dig new subway lines?
This is not the first time Fischer gained media attention for his maps. The Washington Post profiled him and some of his maps last August. Link to infographic on Co.Design
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood writes about the role of mobile applications in empowering transit riders with the information they need to make travel decisions. In a review of 276 transit agency systems, he reports in his Fast Lane blog, only 45 of them provide some information on mobile devices and only 15 offered real-time information. To help expand the availability of transit information, USDOT deputy secretary John Porcari and U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra gathered a group of stakeholders last week to see how the federal government can help more transit riders get better access to information. “Openness empowers people with information to make decisions,” Chopra told organizations that were reluctant to release their service data. “DOT and the Obama Administration got things rolling and will stay involved, but now it’s time for the nation’s transit agencies, app developers, and riders to move the ball down the field,” LaHood concludes. “And if the transit community leverages the momentum we generated with last week’s meeting, I know we’ll find solutions that expand transit use and get people where they’re going more effectively.” Link to full story in Fast Lane.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (NY) announced plans to extend the Bus Time tracking application to the Bronx and another borough to be named later. MTA will equip the 1,025 buses serving the Bronx with GPS units and related hardware to accommodate the service. “Knowing how far away your next bus is means you can spend more time with your family or more time at a coffee shop instead of waiting at a bus stop in a state of uncertainty,” said chairman Joseph J. Lhota in a statement. “About 90% of our customers carry text-message enabled cell phones, so this is a big step forward to help make the lives of our customers a lot easier.” MTA rolled out Bus Time on Staten Island earlier this month; the new installations are expected by the end of 2012.
Last month some enterprising students proposed a plan for donating the unused balance on discarded Metrocards to charity. Now, The Atlantic Cities reports, a homeless man in New York City has found a way to turn those abandoned farecards into cash. John Jones has collected discarded Metrocards for years, bundling them into single $5.00 cards, and selling them to commuters for $4.00. Unfortunately, this entrepreneurial scheme is illegal. While commuters are permitted to combine balances on multiple Metrocards, they are not allowed to resell them. Only Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees are allowed to sell MetroCards, and Jones has been arrested twice since Thanksgiving on charges of unlawful solicitation. Undaunted, Jones estimates that he has earned about $20,000 over the years and told the New York Post, “I’m surprised that people just toss money away.” Link to full story in The Atlantic Cities.
