Estately – a real estate site with “search by transit proximity” function
I’ve started looking at homes in the Portland area. I think the Estately is going to come in handy.
Estately is a real estate site allows people to search for properties by proximity to transit stops. It even allows prospective home buyers to limit their search to stops on certain transit lines.
This is another reason for transit agencies to publish GTFS and make it publicly available. Estately helps your prospective customers choose living arrangements that will make them regular customers.
You can read more details on the about transit proximity search page on Estately.com.
I discovered this site on the Headway wiki.
Metro developer beta
LA Metro has created something very impressive. The beta version of the Metro developers site just launched.
One corner of the Metro developers site.
They offer Google Transit Feed Data, and REST+JSON and XML interfaces for Los Angeles area agencies, stop location data, and schedule information. The site also has GIS shapefiles available for download.
Beyond making data available the site also provides some support resources to help developers do something with it. There is a terminology guide. The site also is a platform for 3rd party developers and LA Metro developers to interact. Most pages have a “comment” option for logged in users, and there is a developer blog.
“Beta” is a uncomfortable concept for some transit agencies; the idea of releasing something that is new and maybe even unfinished is an unfamiliar approach. But Metro appears to have recognized the benefit of the public beta approach — real-world use testing and feedback. By all appearances, this beta site is set up to anticipate and work with change. That makes sense because transit evolves and technology moves quickly. I’m looking forward to seeing the progress.
New agencies in Google Transit: 3 in India, many in China, and 1 in California
Google Transit continues to grow. Here are the latest agencies to join Google Transit this week:
- Foothill Transit
- 3 agencies in India
- Many, many transit agencies in Southeast China.
You can see a full list of new agencies at ChangeDetection.
S.F. BART interview: Making the web, social media, and the developer community work for transit
San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) provides approximately 375,000 passenger trips every day. Since BART operates in the S.F. Bay Area region, just north of Silicon Valley, these passengers include many technologically creative and demanding people.
BART has often led the transit industry in their understanding, use of, and experimentation with online and mobile media. For example, BART responded to rider needs and the opportunities of their unique market by communicating through online social media, releasing schedule and arrival data in open formats, and reaching out to third-party software developers.
The agency was recently recognized by the San Francisco chapter of the American Marketing Association with a 2009 “Excellence in Digital Marketing” Award. BART’s open data initiatives were featured in an Atlantic Monthly article on “iGovernment” in Winter 2009.
I was honored to have the opportunity to ask BART’s web team, Timothy Moore and Melissa Jordan, about lessons they’ve learned and successful strategies and tactics for transit websites.
Update (19 June 2009): A pretty PDF version of this interview as it will appear in More Riders Magazine is now available.
Aaron Antrim: Hi Tim and Melissa. Thanks for agreeing to participate in this interview and share your work and insights with us. First of all, I want to compliment you both on the new BART website; it’s really beautiful. The BART website looks different from a lot of other transit websites that I’ve seen. One thing I am curious about is what happened to the BART train on the home page?
Tim Moore: That’s a good question. I think it’s really common for transit agencies to put shiny equipment or put a cool destination where there’s some borrowed influence and good visuals front-and-center, but the bart.gov redesign was a very user-centered exercise where everything was about the customer, including the front-page visuals. We’re literally putting customers front and center, and even using a lot of authentic rider-contributed images. In fact, a lot of the images that we’re using are licensed under creative commons, directly from Flickr. We’re using them all over the site, particularly in the “Stations” section, because using these real images adds a level of authenticity and reality to the presentation.
