The alternative title to this post is “Time for public transit to get on the information superhighway”, but that is both silly and inaccurate. While what I have to say could apply to city or regional system buses I personally care about Amtrak (Capitol Corridor), Caltrain, and BART. All rails for me.
Anyhow, what the hell, transit agencies? Is it not in your best interest to make your customers happy? I know you have people who work there who have mobile phones and use social networks. Isn’t it time to jump on this web 2.0 thing everyone is abuzz about?
I walked around a train platform for thirty minutes yesterday because there was no way for me to know that the train was going to be late before arriving at the station and hearing the automated voice tell me so. Given the extra time I devised a really basic plan involving everyone’s favorite mainstream microblog site.
Amtrak would create a twitter account for general announcements, with a separate account for each line. So I would follow @capitolcorridor and occasionally get a tweet that said something like:
535 SJC Departing Richmond. 11 minutes behind schedule.
or
System delay due to Freight Traffic between Suisun-Fairfield and Martinez.
The updates would go out for each stop, or every ten minutes for system announcements. You could even do it by train number, in which case I would follow @amtrak535 or something similar.
For folks who take the train every weekday this would be great. I only take it once a week, but I know how to type amtrak535 off and amtrak535 on when I need the information. And twitter users know how as well, the service is really easy.
This of course applies to Caltrain as well. SVBC has created a workgroup to discuss “feasible, near-term ways to improve the Caltrain system for passengers who take their bikes aboard trains”. Their setup is similar enough to Amtrak that I think microblogging would work well as a system to notify passengers of system updates, and cyclists of train car capacity (or some other useful information).
Twitter would no doubt be willing to help an agency, since that is a serious sustainable use of their service. Of course, one wouldn’t have to stop there. A crafty IT staff would leverage all kinds of neato technologies to make aggregation of specific train information as simple as texting on a mobile (they could roll their own: Laconica).
I don’t know what would be appropriate for the BART, or if it would improve much by it, but it is worth looking into none the less. At the very least we could use an announcements account.
I haven’t researched if any of these ideas are already happening, so if you know about any tell me. I will keeping a complexity for it at transit information aggregation.
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Comments 7
you may want to check out yonkly
http://yonkly.com
Posted 10 Dec 2008 at 9:07 pm ¶Dave Winer talked about exactly this on the 8th. He also made a BART twitter feed. Here is his post:
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/12/08/isYourSubwaySystemAPlatfor.html
Posted 11 Dec 2008 at 9:03 am ¶You should check out the BART website:
get text alerts:
bart.gov/alerts
use your mobile:
bart.gov/wireless
follow BART:
twitter.com/sfbart
do it yourself:
Posted 11 Dec 2008 at 12:34 pm ¶bart.gov/developers
There are unofficial Caltrain and bikecar twitter feeds, and someone on transit agency staff is apparently authorized to post updates to them (we got email from the twitter feeds’ admin about this). I was told by another workgroup member that conductors are not allowed to use mobile phones while on the job, so in general it’s harder for them to update than you’d think. But I feel like there’s probably a way around this.
This is item #2 on our prioritized list for discussion with Caltrain. Realtime updates badly neede on all transit systems, and BART is the only Bay Area system that’s more or less on top of this.
Posted 11 Dec 2008 at 4:29 pm ¶I live in the Denver, CO metro area, and I’d love to see something like this here — especially for weather-related delays, which can be unpredictable and significant here.
There’s a GPS-based bus tracking service called Nextbus that apparently SF Muni transit uses. This already sends out bus-specific SMS alerts. Maybe there might be a way to automate tying that in with twitter accounts? The transit agency might not even have to be involved with that Twitter distribution.
Which brings up a point: Sometimes the best coverage of transit does not come from the transit agency, but the riders. Check out CTA Tattler, a riders’-view blog of Chicago transit.
- Amy Gahran
Posted 15 Dec 2008 at 8:34 am ¶Randomly poking around your thots, I see this is an old one but just for your interest’s sake, TransLink in Vancouver uses texting for the bus system. Text them the number of whatever stop (it’s always posted where you are) and it will tell you the time you can expect the next 3-4 to come along. It’s handy for on the fly travel.
Posted 12 Aug 2009 at 12:27 pm ¶That is pretty cool! That is what I envisioned, and no doubt the buses have a GPS system that automatically updates the system without a human needing to maintain a table of times. I will look more into that. It is a wonder why most public transit fleets don’t have something like that in place.
Posted 12 Aug 2009 at 1:41 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 2
[...] interi – Trains should microblog Intriguing exploration of how public transit agencies (or their riders) could provide bus/train-specific updates via Twitter or other microblogging tools. Check out the comments, good brainstorming. This could be VERY practical. (tags: twitter microblogging government transit local text+messaging brainstorming) [...]
[...] artificial biological intelligent beings, enhanced human beings, and artificial intelligences Trains should microblog – interi.org 12/10/2008 The alternative title to this post is “Time for public transit to get on [...]
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