Trillium Solutions blog

Google Maps for mobile includes transit

Aaron Antrim — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:40:36 +0000

Last week, the new version of Google Maps for mobile added transit directions. This means that if your agency is in Google Maps/Transit, then people in your area can look up transit information from their connected mobile phone/PDA when they’re on-the-go and need the information most.

Read more about some of the handy features of the latest version of Google Maps for mobile here, Get bus and train directions on the go with Google Maps for mobile at the official Google mobile blog. (more…)

Conventional schedules and maps harder to use than you think

Aaron Antrim — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:39:40 +0000

Rising gas prices are sending people who formerly drove to seek out other options. On Saturday, the New York Times reported that some public transit systems are seeing ridership increases of up to 10 and 15 percent or more over last year in Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit.

While ridership is up, I hypothesize that even more people are interested in riding public transportation but that not all of them make it onboard the bus or train. Why? Hard-to-use schedules.
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Online store boosts transit pass sales

Aaron Antrim — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:24:13 +0000

Selling transit passes with an online store that accepts credit cards is a great way of making it more convenient for riders to purchase fare media, keep buses rolling on schedule (by avoiding time-consuming on-board pass sales), and even streamline ticket sales that usually happen through a retail location.

Ask Humboldt Transit Authority. So far, they’ve had a great experience with their new online store. It’s easy for everyone to use, and has helped them sell more passes. Plus, it was another great opportunity for positive press attention! (more…)

Real-time arrival displays

Aaron Antrim — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:03:27 +0000

Trillium recently collaborated with Viewpoint Geography for Bay Crossings to implement beautiful real-time “next arrival” displays for BART and SF Muni in downtown San Francisco locations.

Trillium provided the PHP application that serves up the data, and Viewpoint created a sleek, beautiful flash presentation to show the real-time data on large screen displays (see picture). (more…)

Rio Vista Delta Breeze added to Google Transit

Aaron Antrim — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:57:57 +0000

Trillium is proud to announce that another client, Rio Vista Delta Breeze in California has launched on Google Transit. Rio Vista has launched as part of the Google Transit Earth Day Challenge.

Rio Vista chose to put their schedules on Google Transit because scheduling was confusing riders. This will make things a lot easier.

Rio Vista Delta Breeze connects with six neighboring cities to Rio Vista. Some of them have their own public transportation systems, and I’m sure riders would love it to see those agencies included in Google Transit as well, to enable inter-system transit trip itinerary planning.

Add locations in Google Maps/Transit

Aaron Antrim — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:36:32 +0000

Google announced that they’ve added the capability for people to add and edit locations in Google Maps. What does this mean for riders and agencies who use Google Transit? Since Google Transit is integrated with Maps, then presumably this means that locations and place names people use to query transit directions that don’t currently show up will become query-able in Google Transit as people add them. Certainly, this is going to make a few of Trillium’s Google Transit-using clients happy, who have found that some local place-names don’t come up in Google Maps.

The natural language parsing for addresses and place names with Google Maps/Transit is already impressive (try entering from:acv to:moonstone beach, ca). It’s about to get better.

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Trillium work in talk on transit data future

Aaron Antrim — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:47:35 +0000

The Trillium-developed Redwood Transit System website and its use of Google Transit was featured in the updated version of a presentation the Portland TriMet CTO gave at APTA’s TransITech conference. See “Leveraging resources for customer information by exposing transit data” below.

| View | Upload your own

The TriMet presentation about how TriMet has benefited from sharing their data with, and actively reaching out to, developers, and encouraging other transit agencies to do the same. This will make transit information more available, and tools for accessing and manipulating it less expensive and easier to use.

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PDF schedules make unhappy riders & web-surfers

Aaron Antrim — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 08:01:29 +0000

MetroRiderLA has a post on the PDF schedules on Metro’s website. The blogger, Fred Camino, expresses his frustration with the PDF format when used as the exclusive means to present transit schedule data. He calls PDF schedules “obtrusive, annoying, and unwieldy.”

Another widely-regarded expert on general web usability also cautions against misuse of PDFs online.

Not only that, but PDF schedules are frequently difficult or impossible to use for sight-impaired uses.

Transit Information Solutions can help offer schedules in formats that make riders happy, like these user-customizable timetables in a stem-and-leaf format, or just a simple and usable grid. (more…)

FTA names RTS website with Google Transit “Innovative Practice for Increased Ridership”

Aaron Antrim — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:00:03 +0000

A new website, linked to Google Transit, and featuring downloadable schedules for PDAs, iPods, and mobile phones, has been part of more than 30% year-over-year ridership boost for Redwood Transit System in Northern California.

See more features and information here, FTA: Innovative Practices for Increased Ridership.

A new bus pass program also helped boost ridership, and the new website and Google Transit pushed ridership numbers up even further, attracting great press, and helping new and potential riders to understand schedules.

Avoid information overload with schedules for riders’ favorite stops

Aaron Antrim — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:18:50 +0000

Many bus riders have a routine that only involves a few stops — one near their home, and another near work, for example. Looking at a complicated schedule grid that shows stop times for every other stop on the route or in the system, then, is an experience of information overload, making riding the bus more complicated than it has to be.

Recently, Transit Information Solutions worked with Redwood Transit System to build a new feature that that generates custom at-a-glance transit schedules for stops. The timetables list all the hours in the day, with the scheduled service for each hour in a stem-and-leaf table design (see left).

This approach has the advantage of helping riders immediately identify hours with the greatest service opportunities as well as service gaps. All of the stop times function as links to a complete schedule for the trip they are part of, so riders can quickly see when they will arrive.

Since most regular bus commuters predominately use two stops, one near home and another near work, for example, the feature allows two timetables to be displayed alongside each other in a printable view. This makes it possible to produce a personalized transit schedule that can be tacked on a bulletin board or kept handy. Click here to see the feature in action.

One of the great things about the new feature is that it’s built over the same database and information management application that publishes Redwood Transit System’s schedules to Google Transit, and which produces schedule grids and downloadable schedules for iPods, mobile phones, and PDAs on their website, so it was not necessary to enter any new data, and it will be updated automatically with schedule changes.

This new feature was inspired by a blog post on Information Design and Public Transit at the Goodspeed Update, Rob Goodspeed’s website about urbanism and Washington D.C.

Rob Goodspeed wrote a follow-up post noting this feature as implemented on redwoodtransit.org.

This new feature also appeared on the blog of Permanent Campaigns, publishers of More Riders Magazine.