One guide for many agencies and many modes
Today, Trillium Solutions finished creating the Humboldt County Transportation Guide [Download PDF]. It’s headed for the printer and bound for buses, transit centers, businesses, and social services locations next week.
Before this guide, printed schedule information and maps for each agency were available separately. That made it more difficult for passengers to plan inter-agency trips. It also meant that passengers weren’t always aware of all the services available. Imagine, if you will, if you had to consult a different map or road atlas for roads maintained by each city, county, and the State DOT-maintained highways — in short, use a different information source according to the agency responsible for maintaining the roads you are driving on. Probably, if this was reality, driving would not be nearly as popular as it is today! Or, imagine if you had to go to every individual airline’s website to search for available flights and their prices instead of using Travelocity.com or something similar.
The twenty-eight page guide includes timetables for five fixed-route transit services in the Humboldt Bay Area. The overview map also shows connecting regional services, including the local transportation service in adjacent counties, and Greyhound and Amtrak service. Multiple agenies’ services are shown in many of the detail maps that highlight particular cities.
In addition, the service guide responds to findings from the Humboldt County Coordinated Human Services Transportation — Public Transit Plan by showing flexible and on-demand human services transportation services in the same guide. Below is an overview map. It is accompanied by tables of transportation services that show eligibility requirements, service area and hours, accessibility features, contact, and other pertinent information for each service.
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.
SF Bay Area Ferry routes, schedules and walkshed map
This week, an interactive map of San Francisco bay ferry routes and schedules became available on the baycrossings.com homepage. The map shows schedules for all services departing or arriving at a particular ferry terminal if a user clicks it. In addition, the interactive map has three other map views to help travelers plan their trips. These show connecting transit services (BART and SF Muni) at the San Francisco Ferry Building, ferry gates (so you know where to catch your ferry), and a map that shows a few of the amenities in the ferry building.
Here’s what the map looks like before any buttons have been clicked:
And, after a route is selected, here’s a schedule:
The schedule data in this map comes out of information managed with Trillium’s WebSchedule application. One change in WebSchedule changes the schedule information shown in this map view, and in expored Google Transit Feed Specification information for Google Transit.
Trillium worked as a team with Viewpoint Geography to deliver this map for Bay Crossings using the flash Google Maps API. Bay Crossings maintains a shop that sells transit and ferry passes at the San Francisco ferry building, and publishes a monthly publication that features articles of interest on San Francisco Bay cultural, environmental and maritime issues. Bay Crossings, and this project in particular, are great examples of efforts to make transit information easier to use, reach new customers, and build and publicize a lifestyle brand around transit.
So, check out the map on the Bay Crossings website, and tell me what you think!
New: Transit layer in Google Maps
The Google Transti trip planner is a great way for people to plan a single transit trip, but what about when you want to get the big picture of transit networks in a given area?
Two weeks ago, Google announced the the addition of a “transit layer” to Google Maps. For the full announcement see New ways to get around with the transit layer (Google LatLong).
Imagine some of the uses: you’re looking to buy a new house, and are most interested in houses near transit to reduce transportation costs and your carbon footprint. Just pull up a Google Maplet for real estate and turn on the transit layer to make your search easy. Or, you’re looking for a hotel to stay in on a business trip, and you’d like to find one within convenient distance of transit to avoid the cost of a car rental: just pull up a map of hotels on Google Maps, turn on the transit layer, and choose a convenient hotel.
Currently, the transit layer is available for about 59 cities. Many, but not all, of these cities participate in the Google Transit trip planner. Not all cities that participate in the Google Transit trip planner are included in the transit layer. I’ve inquired on how Trillium and agencies can ensure that the data we produce will be suitable for use in the Google Maps transit layer, and am awaiting more information.
Below, transit layer for Chicago.
Online rural transit marketing project for easy-to-use coordinated information and service
Recently, Trillium worked with Transit Marketing to revise and re-launch deltarides.com, a website for Delta Rides, an association of about ten transit agencies in the Mississippi Delta region.
The website includes a service map that shows transit routes rom many different providers throughout the region on one map. Clicking on a route in the legend or in the map brings the user to more agency and schedule information. What would otherwise be a complicated web of disconnected information that the transit rider has to stitch together themselves is now easier-to-navigate.
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Route-specific marketing: an online community-based approach
I am proud to share Trillium’s work in an innovative route-specific marketing initiative for the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District (CUMTD) launched in October.
CUMTD increased service frequency on one of their core routes, the Green Route. To get the word out, they engaged business and community partners who distributed information about how easy it is to ride the Green Route to their customers and employees.
As part of the bargain, “Go Green Every 15″ partners were featured on the campaign’s website, www.green15.org. Below, a screenshot showing the route map superimposed with partner locations.
The campaign appears to have contributed to the success of the service expansion, with CUMTD reporting strong ridership increases on the Green Route.
Open source and open data make for transit innovation
If you ever have the pleasure of visiting Portland, Oregon, one of the things you will notice make the city great is their transit system called TriMet. One of the best parts of riding TriMet, for me, is how available and easy-to-use their information is.
A few examples: When you arrive at the airport, next arrival information for the MAX train is displayed on the baggage carousel screens. And their trip planner shows beautiful maps to help you plan your journey by transit — and even shows street views of where stops are. And there here are many third part applications that you can use to look up transit data on mobile devices.
Much of this, and more, has happened because of TriMet’s efforts to make their schedule and arrival data available to anyone who can do something useful with it, and because of their embrace of open source software.
In order to learn about some of the online strategies that have contributed to TriMet’s successes, I caught up with Tim McHugh, TriMet’s Chief Technology Officer and Bibiana McHugh, IT Manager of GIS and Location-Based Services. Many thanks to Bibiana & Tim for their time and their inspiring work.
Below is the text of the interview. You can also download the PDF version (with pictures) of the interview as it appeared in More Riders Magazine.
Conventional schedules and maps harder to use than you think
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.
Imagine the experience of someone who has never rode their local bus or train but decides to give it a try. The third most common internet activity for Americans, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, is to “search for a map or driving directions,” (87%) behind only email and using search engines, so it’s natural to look online for public transportation information. If a transit provider’s website doesn’t offer a trip planner, the prospective rider will need to find the nearest stop to their home on a map, find scheduled service times for the stop, and, most likely, figure out where and how to transfer, by consulting maps and schedules for their destination and transfer point. The information-finding task is more complicated if it involves multiple agencies.
To someone who is unfamiliar with public transportation, this entire process may be sufficiently daunting to keep them driving. Consider a study conducted by the National Center for Transit Reseach at the University of South Florida, Design Elements of Effective Transit Information Materials (109 page PDF).
The study investigates how the general public (not necessarily existing transit riders) perform at planning a transit trip using conventional printed materials. For the purposes of the study, the trip planning process was considered as five stages. Most study participants were successful at identifying origin and destination points on a map, and at identifying nearby bus stops, but almost half of participants were unable to correctly identify bus times using the tabular schedules.
Good online information and Google Transit, a transit trip itinerary planner, can make a frustrating 5-step process that many new riders fail at (get one of the steps wrong, and the whole trip planning process is derailed) into a convenient 15-second experience. New bus riders have even told me that they spend a lot more time entering queries for trips to various destinations, not just their commute to work. Since it’s so fast, easy, and fun, they take the opportunity to explore and get to know the public transportation system, which means they will be much more inclined to get on the bus or train.
Every time someone goes to look for transit information looking for relief from high gas prices, but is frustrated by hard-to-use transit maps and schedules, public transportation misses a great opportunity. Partner with Trillium to reach the surge of people shifting from driving to public transit.
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Add locations in Google Maps/Transit
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.
