Google Transit issues Earth Day challenge to transit agencies
Raines Cohen, *Camp Counselor
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 ]
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
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
Chas_Belov_SFMTA
line. One issue with this is if the vehicle travels off the road line,
whether due to a private ROW, as with the SFMTA/Muni J Church or the
Pittsburgh PAT busways, or through properties with are not considered
public roads, as with SFMTA/Muni 89 Laguna Honda (Laguna Honda
hospital roadways), 38 Geary (V.A. Hospital roadways), or SamTrans
(Serramonte transit center, within the parking lot of Serramonte
Center).
I assume IP=Intellectual Property and not IP=Internet Protocol.
I believe Trapeze, which the SFMTA uses, does not readily output a
turns file. I am not an expert in Trapeze, so this information may not
be correct.
Hope this helps,
Charles "Chas" Belov
SFMTA Webmaster
On Mar 19, 7:38 am, "Joe Hughes" <joe.hughes.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (cross-posting again)
>
> 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.
>
Aaron Antrim
Rather than straight lines, perhaps the line could conform to the road
line.
It seems as though this approach could display incorrect route paths in instances where the vehicle does not travel in the most direct path between two scheduled stops (and, in my experience mapping out Redwood Transit System routes this happened frequently). The appearance of an accurate route path may mislead end users. Providing more information when it is in inaccurate is worse than providing less information if it's more accurate.
Gary Air
Some people say Wikipedia is more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. I am a big believer in “crowdsourcing” (glad we now have a name for it). I don’t see how it could hurt to create a site and let the user beware. We might be surprised how accurate it might turn out.