Tom Vanderbilt on how the iPhone and its ilk will change transportation
Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why we drive the way we do just published iTransport, inventorying the most promising transportation apps for driving, parking, biking, transit and walking in Slate.
“Transportation is civilization,” Rudyard Kipling once wrote. Today we’re more inclined to express this equation with words like mobility and accessibility, but the spirit’s the same: The flow of people and goods (”traffic and all that it implies,” per Kipling) makes the world hum. But transit can feel uncivilized: We sit in congestion (wishing for the path less taken); we miss trains; we hunt for good places to park a car or a bike; we get lost.
Enter the iPhone. One of the device’s greatest areas of promise is as a transportation tool. Rival smartphones, of course, are equipped with GPS, Internet access, etc., but none corral quite so many of the features that delight transpo geeks (an accelerometer, a compass, etc.) into one device. And rival phones can only envy the iPhone’s flourishing app market, which includes some 65,000 options, many at least peripherally related to transportation (that is, if you include parallel parking games and the like).
SF Bay ferry services live on Google Transit
On Friday, the San Francisco ferry services went live on Google Transit. Now, travelers can plan inter-agency trips across BART, Muni, AC Transit and other services along with the five ferry services: Golden Gate Ferry, Baylink, Oakland/Alameda Ferry, Alameda Harbor Bay Ferry, and Blue & Gold Fleet at maps.google.com or an iPhone, iPod touch, or other mobile device like a Blackberry or Android-based phone.
Trillium publishes the GTFS for the ferry services with the support of Bay Crossings. We’re experimenting with ways of consolidating the management and dissemination of schedule information for customers. Currently, information from a centralized database, manipulated through Trillium’s WebSchedule is presented through the published GTFS for Google Transit, the SF Bay Ferries map at baycrossings.com, and the large flat panel display of scheduled ferry arrivals and departures at the San Francisco Bay Ferry Building Bay Crossings store location.
UC Berkeley Bear Transit schedules and multi-modal transportation map
This weekend, UC Berkeley launched new features on their Parking & Transportation website to help people use campus shuttles and bike and car parking infrastructure.
Trillium built these new features for Quiddities Dev, Inc., the firm that has produced UC Berkeley Parking & Transportations’s Drupal-powered website. Sidenote: I met the CEO of Quiddities at a TransitCamp Bay Area in 2008. Thanks, TransitCamp!
So, here’s some of what I think is worth sharing out of the new features.
1.) Trillium used the open-source TimeTable Publisher to create some very nice looking timetables in both vertical and horizontal layouts (for accessibility) from the Google Transit Feed Spec (GTFS) data for Bear Transit schedule and geographic information. Thanks, TriMet, for making TimeTable Publisher free and open source!
All the timetables are linked from the Shuttle Schedules page.
2.) Again, re-using a lot of the data used for GTFS production, we delivered a multi-modal online transportation map. The map shows all shuttle route alignments and stops for selected routes. If the user clicks a stop, it shows all the scheduled service at the parti
