Convergence of Mobility and Mobility (ConMaM)
I am a bit obsessed with the idea that travel information plays a crucial (and often overlooked) role in sustainable mobility options.
Ian Sacs on the Planetizen blog has an idea for how one facet of this issue — mobility information on mobile devices — can get more attention. New acryonyms! (If you’ve been involved in the planning or transit fields for long, you are well aware of the preponderence of acronyms that we use.)
Will the planning and transit communinity introduce ConMaM (Convergence of Mobility and Mobility) to its lexicon? We’ll see. But they already are, and need to continue to incorporate the idea into practice:
The technology and transportation industries use the same word “mobility” for two very different purposes. In technology, mobility represents the ease of portability of various devices (phones, cameras, music players, etc.). In transportation, mobility describes the ease of portability of ourselves. The idea of ConMaM is that the more we take advantage of the power of mobile devices, the better we will be able to get around. That is, as we converge mobile devices with mobility systems, we will be able to improve the efficiency and convenience of these systems.
How Google Transit is more than just another trip planner – More Riders Magazine
Last year, More Riders Magazine Publisher Dan Johnson-Weinberger interviewed Tom Sly, Google New Business Development Manager for Google Transit. “Googling the Future” was published in More Riders Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2008. The interview/article does a great job at explaining how Google Transit is more than just another trip planner, and how it changes the way we think about public transportation.
A blog to watch: “Human Transit”
Yesterday, I discovered a new favorite blog, “Human Transit.”
The blog is by Jarrett Walker, a consultant at McCormick Rankin Cagney. On the welcome post, he says:
Since 1991 I’ve been a consulting transit planner, helping to design transit networks and policies for a huge range of communities. My goal here is to start conversations about how transit works, and how we can use it to create better cities and towns.
Just a few posts in, there are some interesting ideas and new approaches on the blog, topics including transit language (transfering vs. connecting) and online apps to help citizens understand transit planning issues.
I’ve added the blog to my feedreader and am looking forward to reading more of what Jarrett has to say.
Establishing strategic direction for the federal “Intelligent Transportation Systems Program”
From TheTransitWire.com comes an alert that the USDOT Resarch and Innovative Technology Administration is seeking comments on the “Intelligent Transportation Systems Program”.
Here are the details from the page at Regulations.gov:
DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
Research and Innovative Technology Administration
[Docket No. RITA 2009-0001]
Establishing Strategic Direction for the Intelligent
Transportation Systems Program
AGENCY: Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), DOT.
ACTION: Request for public comments.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SUMMARY: The U.S. Department of Transportation's (DOT) Intelligent
Transportation Systems Joint Program Office (ITS JPO) is requesting
public comments on the proposed direction, goals, and objectives for
the multi-modal ITS Program over the next five years. Comments will be
used to shape a multi-year, strategic, research agenda that will result
in an ITS Program Strategic Plan in October 2009. Respondents to this
RFI are invited to comment on any of the items; in particular,
respondents are encouraged to address the specific questions
that are featured at the end of this RFI. This RFI was prepared
with the intention of insuring that all
stakeholders and parties interested in ITS have the opportunity to
provide input and comment on the next five-year, strategic direction
for ITS research, technology transfer, and evaluation.
DATES: Comments must be submitted by May 20, 2009. Late-filed comments
will be considered to the extent practicable.
ADDRESSES: You may submit comments identified by DOT Docket Number RITA
2009-0001 by any of the following methods:
[cir] Federal eRulemaking Portal: Go to http://www.regulations.gov.
Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
[cir] Mail: Docket Management Facility: U.S. Department of
Transportation, 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE., West Building Ground
Floor, Room W12-140, Washington, DC 20590-0001.
Google Transit: Some numbers from Missoula, Montana
In June of 2008, Mountain Line transit in Missoula became the first (and still only) agency in Montana to participate in Google Transit. Recently, I reached out to find what kind of ridership increase, if any, they can attribute to Google Transit.
Jordan Hess is a planning student at the University of Montana in Missoula. He has also contracted with Mountain Line to put them on Google Transit and maintain the information. Here’s what he has to say about ridership trends since the Google Transit launch. What stood out to me was that ridership for July of 2008, one month after the Google Transit launched, increased by 31% from July of 2007.
We went live with Google Transit on about June 1st of last year with a rather soft launch (i.e. no immediate press releases, etc.) Our first press coverage was on June 25, with a front page article in the local paper, available at http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2008/06/25/news/local/news04.txt
In the four months following our initial press coverage of Google Transit, ridership jumped 20.08% from the previous year. As much as I would like to attribute this exclusively to Google Transit, there were other complicating factors. Of course, in 2008, gas prices were climbing so that brought more people onto the bus.
Also, in 2008, a local business sponsored “Fare-Free Fridays;” essentially they paid the cash fare equivalent for every Friday that summer. In 2007, however, there were a number of fare-free days due to poor air quality. We had a terrible forest fire season in 2007, and when air quality drops below a certain threshold from smoke or particulate matter, the county health department subsidizes the fare. I’m trying to look into the total number of fare-free days each summer, as that may have had an effect.
Additionally, in October, the adult cash fare went from $0.85 to $1.00. This seemed to have an effect on ridership as well. For the entire period from July 1 to Feb 28, we had a total ridership increase of about 12.78%, with ridership this winter nearly the same as last winter.
Interestingly, in July, the month immediately following our launch of Google Transit, we had an increase of 31.58% from 2007 to 2008. For the sake of comparison, the month of May saw only a 7.83% increase from 2007 to 2008.
Thanks for the info, Jordan! Does anyone know of other agencies on Google Transit with interesting ridership numbers?
A bicycle trip planner
I’ve appreciated being able to use the byCycle trip planner in Portland, Oregon to plan my bike trips through the city on the easiest, safest and most enjoyable routes.
If your area already has an online transit trip planner (fairly common) but not a bicycle trip planner (uncommon), and would like to introduce a bicycle trip planner, the byCycle blog has a post on what it takes to add a new area to byCycle.org: money and data. You can can use the open source code to install and maintain your own byCycle trip planner. Full details are in this blog post.
After all, bikes and transit belong together.
Below, a screenshot of the trip planner.
Fresno Area Express joins Google Transit
As part of my initiative to update this blog more frequently, and note changes with the Google Transit trip planner, I’ve resolved to post when new agencies join Google Transit.
This week, Fresno Area Express joined Google Transit.
You can see a complete list of agencies covered here.
William Lachance on “Creating a google transit feed for fun and profit”
Just wanted to send a shout out for William Lachance, who created a Google Transit feed and trip planner, hbcus.ca, for Halifax Metro Transit as a volunteer.
He described the process he used to gather location information and include it with schedule data on his blog post “Creating a google transit feed for fun and profit.”
The post gives a window into some of the issues involved in creating Google Transit feeds in situations where bus stop location information and schedule information is not available in a standardized format (this is the case for almost all of Trillium’s small clients). It also shows some of the ways the Google Transit Feed Specification is being applied outside of Google Transit.
Below, a screenshot of hbus.ca.
Transit agencies: Have you looked at your website’s statistics lately?
There’s a lot to be learned from looking closely at your website’s visitor statistics. I recommend to my clients that they use Google Analytics to track visitors on their websites because it’s free, easy-to-implement and use, and provides a lot of information (much, much more than I’ll breeze through here).
Recently, I was digging around in the statistics for Redwood Transit System and thought I would share some of the things that stood out (with the manager’s permission, of course).
First, here are redwoodtransit.org visitor statistics for roughly the past year.
73,770 visits is significant traffic for an agency that posts about one-half million boardings per year. If people successfully find the information they are after, each one of those visits would probably result in at least two boardings — one to get there, and another for a return trip.
Note the “bounce rate” — that’s the number of visitors who immediately leave the site because they haven’t found what they are looking for or are at the wrong site. 16% is a low bounce rate. And note that once people are on the site, they stick around, looking at an average of 4.2 pages. Imagine the cost of printing all those 306,555 pages viewed, or answering those questions by phone.
Second, here is an “overlay” that shows the links visitors clicked on.
As I would expect, schedules are, by far, the most popular piece of content on the site. But one thing that stood out at me is number of people that click the button to flip start and end addresses. It looks like this (
). You can’t see it above because it’s obscured by the overlaid visitorship statistic (11%) after (”End”) in the trip planner box.
Anyway, statistics for the number of trips planned using the Google Transit trip planner are not available because trip planning happens off the RTS website, at maps.google.com. But that 11% figure gives a clue. If 11% of people who visit this page click that little button (which I’ve rarely used), then many, many more are clicking the “Get Directions” box without ever clicking the flip start/end address button.
And, don’t forget the people who plan transit trips by going to maps.google.com without ever visiting the RTS website.
Third, here’s a breakdown of the top pages visited on the site.
Note that the Redwood Transit System website includes a feature that shows service schedules by stop. The visitor statics show the relative popularity of these stops online, and, unsurprisingly, their popularity corresponds with the relative instances of boarding/alightings documented in the most Recent Transit Development Plan for Redwood Transit System.
This points to an interesting opportunity. Transit agencies could use logs from trip planners to assess customer needs and wants. That may supplement the picture that comes from demand statistics on existing scheduled routes.
Does anyone know of agencies that do this already? Or want to implement this?
A great testimonial for Google Transit
I follow a lot of blogs related to transportation and technology and sometimes I come across some powerful testimonials for Google Transit.
Here is one from the comments section of a blog post on the Greater Greater Washington blog some time ago:
It is amazing how much easier it is to plan out a transit route with google maps than with other tools. A lot more people might ride buses if they could find the best route easily. I recently just started commuting via bus from Arlington into Tysons and have found that, unbelievably, it is faster than driving. I’d probably have started riding the bus years ago if there had been an easy way to find that out. (db on Mar 11, 2009 11:49 pm)
