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.
Real-time arrival displays
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). Read more
