help shape MTC’s Transportation 2035 Plan

[Kaushal Jhalla]

 

I was on the BART yesterday and received this flyer inviting Bay Area residents to help shape the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Transportation 2035 Plan and I thought I'd share the details. These are a series of Public workshops are scheduled in all Bay Area counties.

 

According to the MTC website, here the workshops aim to accomplish:

• How should we direct scarce resources to provide the infrastructure to support communities primed for higher housing growth?
• How should we reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation sources and respond to the effects of global warming already underway?
• How should we harness the power of the marketplace and cutting-edge technology to deal with congestion?
• How do we make policy and investment choices that yield equitable benefits to all residents?

Link to the Public Workshops: http://www.mtc.ca.gov/planning/2035_plan/workshops.htm

 

Cheers,

 

Kaushal

[Gary Air]

I wish we could convince Govt. agencies to put stuff like this on www.Upcoming.org  .

[Chas_Belov_SFMTA]

There are multiple issues with this. We could post not only on
upcoming.org but Craigslist, ba.transportation, and presumably other
community calendars and transit related sites. It does become an issue
of staff time; I'm a one-person shop here at the SFMTA (although I
don't necessarily have to be the one who posts the information). A
concern I have is that when an event gets posted in multiple places,
and there is a change to the event time, date, or place, that the
change will not get propogated across all of the places it got posted.

Since we're supposed to be about solutions, my take would be that we
would post the event on our RSS feed, and upcoming.org, Craigslist,
and ba.transportation would automatically pick up the event and post
it. They would also pick up updates as the RSS feed was updated.

A barrier to this is that the calendar microformat uses (in opposition
to microformat principles of transparency) human-unfriendly dates,
times, and specification of end date. The solution to that would be to
change the microformat to use human-friendly dates, times, and
specification of end date.

Hope this helps,
Charles "Chas" Belov
SFMTA Webmaster

On May 7, 4:54 pm, Gary Air <Gary...@informart.com> wrote:
> I wish we could convince Govt. agencies to put stuff like this onwww.Upcoming.org<http://www.Upcoming.org> .

>
> From: transitca...@googlegroups.com [mailto:transitca...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Kaushal Jhalla
> Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 4:27 PM
> To: transitca...@googlegroups.com
> Subject: [TransitCampBA] help shape MTC's Transportation 2035 Plan
>
> I was on the BART yesterday and received this flyer inviting Bay Area residents to help shape the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Transportation 2035 Plan and I thought I'd share the details. These are a series of Public workshops are scheduled in all Bay Area counties.
>
> According to the MTC website, here the workshops aim to accomplish:

> * How should we direct scarce resources to provide the infrastructure to support communities primed for higher housing growth?
> * How should we reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation sources and respond to the effects of global warming already underway?
> * How should we harness the power of the marketplace and cutting-edge technology to deal with congestion?
> * How do we make policy and investment choices that yield equitable benefits to all residents?

[Tara Hunt]

Can't everyone post anything on Upcoming.org and Craigslist...even if we aren't the event originator? ;)

T

--
tara 'miss rogue' hunt
coFounder
Citizen Agency (www.citizenagency.com)
blog: www.horsepigcow.com
phone: 415-694-1951
fax: 415-727-5335

[Gary Air]

You've hit the nail on the head Chas. Maybe we need an EventML to add to TripML so that all event networks/users can stay in sync. I wonder if this ends up becoming something like mesh computing?

I recently had a conversation with a non-techie about why Upcoming hasn't caught on in the real world much. He complained that there are too many event sites. I'm afraid some people actually don't like choice because it complicates their life! They just want to be told how to do it one way that works all the time. Perhaps mesh will simplify things for us all and put a stop to the winner-takes-all philosophy of the current walled garden approach to social networking.

Dave

[Raines Cohen]

The whole point of services like upcoming is that we don't need to wait for them to do it. We are empowered to do it ourselves.

I just added the Alameda one:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/612833

If everyone added their county's event, we'd have great coverage.

As to the issue of notification/scheduling, that's a different topic.

Raines

[Margaret Okuzumi]

It’s not hard. I can ask the MTC Public Information Office to do so in the future. Are there sites other than Upcoming that you think it appropriate for them to post notices to?

 

Margaret

[Gary Air]

I’m happy with Upcoming.org alone.  I believe it is the cleanest event site available.  I hope Yahoo and the community will continue to invest in its capabilities.  It appears to be very open with its ability to create “badges” on your own web site, and it also appears to have a very capable API.

[Chas_Belov_SFMTA]

On May 8, 2:33 pm, "Margaret Okuzumi" <okuz...@silcon.com> wrote:
> It's not hard. I can ask the MTC Public Information Office to do so in the
> future. Are there sites other than Upcoming that you think it appropriate
> for them to post notices to?
>
> Margaret

As previously mentioned,

Craigslist's Public Transportation Forum
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/forums/?forumID=129&all=N

and

ba.transportation
http://groups.google.com/group/ba.transportation/topics

These are likely to have people interested in local transportation,
and their populations would not necessarily overlap upcoming.org

Hope this helps,
Charles "Chas" Belov
SFMTA Webmaster

www.sfmta.com/webmaster