OPTION OPPORTUNITIESBy embracing open data, transit agencies can engage interested programmers and encourage improvements to and analysis of transportation systems.
Being able to boast online about your bikeshare mileage. A tracking app that saves transit agencies money. A way to catch the train to the baseball game at just the right time.
Open transit data is driving people to think about how they can make systems better and more engaging. In a recent Washington Post feature, Katherine Shaver details how Transportation Techies is part of a broad trend of passionate developers creating innovative transit fixes.
The group, which Mobility Lab sponsors, meets monthly to share tech projects relating to that month’s theme, which ranges from walking, to biking, and even parking. Shaver writes that for agencies and programmers alike, these projects work as a two-way street for learning from transit patterns and service problems.
Kim Lucas, the District’s Capital Bikeshare program manager, said that techies’ digital maps showing Bikeshare trips across the city have helped her spot trends that weren’t as clear in her Excel spreadsheets.
“We get interesting analysis for free,” Lucas said. “It’s great to see what another set of eyes has seen when they see your data.”
Every agency that adds new GPS devices to track its buses or vehicle counters to monitor traffic congestion provides more data to massage for trends and anomalies.
The most recent Transportation Techies meetup (see our more detailed story coming soon) featured a number of apps, visualizations and solutions centered on Capital Bikeshare. The organization’s good record on open data also provides an insight into bicycling patterns in the region.
In the Washington region, techies say, Capital Bikeshare helped set a new standard when it launched in the District five years ago. From the beginning, the program’s operator has been required to provide quarterly system data on its Web site, including details of every Bikeshare trip.
Howard Jennings, managing director of Mobility Lab, the research arm of Arlington County’s commuter services program, said more transit agencies are overcoming their reluctance to let the public peek inside their data streams.
“Some of them saw themselves only as [transit] operators and didn’t see the need to provide data so someone could develop an app,” Jennings said. “But gradually, they’ve said, ‘Wait a minute: Those are our passengers, and that’s our revenue.’ People realized the benefits of opening up their data — that it’s not going to be a bunch of espionage.”
One recent success story presented in Transportation Techie’s August Baltimore meetup was programmer Chris Whong’s creation of a better bus-tracking app for the Maryland Transit Administration. Ultimately, his work helped expedite the creation of a better bus app and save the agency money in the process.
Chris Whong, 34, said he recently became intrigued by a Facebook post of a news story noting that the Maryland Transit Administration had created a Web site, rather than a smartphone app, to show Baltimore buses’ locations. The story by Baltimore Brew, an online publication, quoted the MTA as saying it would have cost $600,000 for a consultant to make the state’s clunky bus data usable in trip-planning apps.
Whong said it took a few hours clicking away in his Brooklyn apartment to make the data “more consumable” for app developers.
“It was just sort of an interesting conundrum that I wanted to help figure out,” he said. “When I’m not working, I’m always hacking on something.”
Michael Walk, MTA’s director of service development, said the agency is building on Whong’s workaround to make its bus data more accurate and accessible.
“The reality is, we don’t consider ourselves app developers,” Walk said. “There are people who do that very well. . . . They think of ways to solve problems that we might not have ever thought of.”
Techies and transportation enthusiasts interested in learning what others are making, from homemade traffic counters to transit routing applications, can get involved at the Transportation Techies Meetup page.
Photo: Malynda Chizek Frouard present her CaBiBrags website at the most recent Transportation Techies. Via M.V. Jantzen, Flickr