Re: [TransitCampBA] Google Transit issues Earth Day challenge to transit agencies
Joe Hughes
Hey Raines,
Thanks for bringing this up. The question of crowdsourcing transit
data is an interesting one--a lot of people have talked about it over
the years, but I don't know of many efforts that have succeeded:
* The original late-90's transitinfo.org and SocalTIP websites, where
volunteers typed up transit schedules and put them up in text form.
* The old Métro program for PDAs, for which the authors solicited
user-contributed data files for subway systems. These files were very
simple (most didn't even have station locations!), and the authors
claimed copyright over the submitted data.
* Most transit mashups are usually either a single person either
hand-entering a small amount of subway information, or scraping a
larger amount of bus information from the agency's site, so it's
usually a very small crowd. OnNYTurf has done some interesting stuff
with having users send in photos of station maps, and also with their
wiki for station metadata (though even then it appears that 2 people
do most of the data entry there).
* There was an interesting effort that Kieran Huggins and Kevin
Branagan were working on following the original Toronto
TransitCamp--they scraped the TTC website and then had a mashup where
contributors could improve the extracted shapes of the routes to
better match the real schedules. I don't know if that software is
still under development, though.
Would Google use crowdsourced transit data for routing? It's not out
of the question, particularly if they thought that the group that put
it together was in a position to keep it accurate and current over the
years. But in most cases, I suspect the effort of crowdsourcing data
would be better spent on just convincing the agencies to share the
data that's already in their databases, or on building other useful
transit tools.
Joe
On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Raines Cohen, *Camp Counselor
<rai...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This seems quite relevant and related to TransitCamp... a continuation
> of ideas discussed there. I have to say it's a delight every time I
> use Google Maps and it suggests a transit alternative with projected
> savings... perhaps there's an opportunity for a partnership to compare
> carbon footprint and other impacts of trips via different modes.
> Although, as our event identified, it's not just a matter of the
> service providers supplying data; we can crowdsource it, too, if
> Google's willing to use that data as at least an interim measure. --
> Raines, *Camp Counselor
>
> 1. Google Transit issues Earth Day challenge to transit agencies
> Posted by: "3/11 Google Transit" ba...@yahoogroups.com batn_control
> Date: Mon Mar 17, 2008 12:25 pm ((PDT))
>
> Published Tuesday, March 11, 2008, by Google Transit via Lat Long Blog
>
> The Google Transit Earth Day challenge
>
> Posted by Tom Sly
> New Business Development Manager, Google Transit
>
> I recently attended a conference for technical staff in the public
> transportation industry. I told them about the great progress Google
> Transit has been able to make in the past year:
>
> * integrating transit information directly into Google Maps by
> making stations and stops visible and clickable
>
> * promoting transit as an alternative each time we show driving
> directions in an area where we have transit data
>
> * expanding coverage from nine agencies in the U.S. to more than
> 30 agencies spanning three continents
>
> But, of course, we don't do this on our own: we rely on transit
> agencies to share their data with us so that everyone -- residents,
> tourists, and lifetime riders -- can benefit from having the
> information at their fingertips. Taking public transport is a great
> option for people to reduce their impact on global warming, so I
> issued a challenge to those at the conference: get your agency up
> and running <http://tinyurl.com/2lln5t> on Google Maps in time for
> April 22, 2008 -- better known as Earth Day.
>
> We've already had several agencies get in touch with us, but with
> over 200 agencies in the U.S. alone, we still have a lot of ground to
> cover. So now I'd like to extend this challenge to everyone: if your
> local agency isn't already participating <http://google.com/transit>,
> get in touch with them and let them know that you'd like to see their
> information on Google Maps.
>
>
> [BATN was disappointed to learn that Google Transit for the Bay Area
> only has BART, Caltrain and VTA so far ... in order to provide useful
> coverage, other key agencies such as Muni, AC Transit, SamTrans,
> Golden Gate Transit, ACE, the Capitol Corridor and the ferries need
> to make their data available to Google Transit as per the following
> instructions: http://tinyurl.com/2lln5t ]
>
>
> >
>
Kieran Huggins
I thought I should take this opportunity to chime in on the current
status of our project.
We are most definitely still developing the OpenTransit platform, and
I'm happy to report that we're (finally!) nearing it's initial public
release. In fact, I was working on the public-facing CSS as this message
came in :-)
Since it ended up being a very small development team, we ended up
abandoning the use of the forum software we were initially using in
favour of IM and pair programming. As it happens, both Kevin and I live
about 3 blocks from one another, so the need for online coordination
quickly withered. Oliver Saunders has been a huge help as well, and will
be moving to Toronto shortly from the UK to work with us full time. I
really love how interesting projects like this help you find and connect
with great people.
After a busy year (for all of us) we've finally been able to put aside
some serious time to get the app finished. We're aiming for the launch
to coincide with the next Toronto TransitCamp in early April (watch Mark
Kuznicki's blog at http://remarkk.com for details). The first
incarnation will go live at http://myttc.ca
We've been mindful to keep the app system-agnostic, due in no small part
to the excellent work Joe and Google Transit have done with their GTDF.
In the spirit of open access to transit data we've built in both a REST
API and a GTDF export. It's my sincerest hope that the data will
eventually be of a quality such that Google Transit can use the feed (in
lieu of the TTC's currently unavailable data). The TTC do an excellent
job of running a transit system, and we're all happy to be able to pitch in.
Cheers,
Kieran
Joe Hughes
After thinking about it a little more, there is one part of transit
data that would be well-suited to crowdsourcing: collecting the shapes
for routes. Many agencies that are already sharing data with Google
and the public still aren't providing information on the paths that
the buses and trains take, either because they don't have the
information, or because their shape data has IP constraints. These
systems have to be shown by just drawing straight lines between the
stop locations, which can look bad in many cases.
So having good shapes to add to the schedule data would really help.
Not only that, but I think that creating route shapes on a map is
fairly rewarding for an individual contributor, so it's a good
candidate for an addictive community project.
Kieran just posted an update about the OpenTransit software I mentioned:
http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers/browse_thread/thread/ea5354b102465741
Perhaps this tool, or the similar one that Chris St. Pierre has been
building for his Cincy Metro Interactive Map project, would make a
good starting point for such an effort.
Joe
Joe Hughes
seeing more!
Joe
On Mar 19, 12:14 am, Kieran Huggins <kie...@kieran.ca> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I thought I should take this opportunity to chime in on the current
> status of our project.
>
> We are most definitely still developing the OpenTransit platform, and
> I'm happy to report that we're (finally!) nearing it's initial public
> release. In fact, I was working on the public-facing CSS as this message
> came in :-)
>
> Since it ended up being a very small development team, we ended up
> abandoning the use of the forum software we were initially using in
> favour of IM and pair programming. As it happens, both Kevin and I live
> about 3 blocks from one another, so the need for online coordination
> quickly withered. Oliver Saunders has been a huge help as well, and will
> be moving to Toronto shortly from the UK to work with us full time. I
> really love how interesting projects like this help you find and connect
> with great people.
>
> After a busy year (for all of us) we've finally been able to put aside
> some serious time to get the app finished. We're aiming for the launch
> to coincide with the next Toronto TransitCamp in early April (watch Mark
> incarnation will go live athttp://myttc.ca
Kieran Huggins
Kevin is currently refactoring the tool to use an automatic polygon generation feature of Google Maps that can generate the shapes more intelligently using existing street shapes and far fewer way-points. His prototype seems to work very nicely, but it's on the back-burner for the next week or so.
One of the problems we encountered in the TTC dataset is that they're missing about 80% of the actual number of stops, providing schedule data for mid-to-major intersections only. We're counting on crowdsourcing the remaining stop locations, filling in the stoptimes by working out the partial polygon length.
Also, a friend named Sean Lerner had an incredible response when he solicited "rider efficiency tips" on his website several years ago - I think this is also an excellent type of data to crowdsource.
Kieran