Month: March 2015

AC Transit Institutes Service Changes*, Doesn’t Fully Explain Their Magnitude

Update: AC Transit just put out a press release via email making the following clear. My minor scoop only lasted for a day.

Turning the Corner: District Begins to Expand Service

During the worst of the Great Recession, the District went through painful budget cutting and our customers lost service on the street. But over the last several years, the combination of the District’s efforts to reduce costs and operate more efficiently (including purchasing newer buses), the growing economy, and an increasing ridership has enabled us to begin adding service again.

The first round of enhancements total $2.7 million in annual service. Half of these were implemented in December and the remainder will launch on March 15

Among the exciting enhancements are the introduction of weekend service on the San Pablo Rapid from Richmond to downtown Oakland…

Continue reading “AC Transit Institutes Service Changes*, Doesn’t Fully Explain Their Magnitude”

Using GTFS and PostGIS to calculate levels of scheduled service

Recently I was asked about using calculating the amount of scheduled service. This post is the result of a quick experiment to prove the process with PostGIS.

Recently I was asked about using calculating the amount of scheduled service. This post is the result of a quick experiment to prove the process with PostGIS.

Following along assumes:

  • Basic knowledge of SQL and git,
  • Basic familiarity with GTFS, and
  • A copy of PostgreSQL with the PostGIS extension.

Continue reading “Using GTFS and PostGIS to calculate levels of scheduled service”

Much ado about open data

The tech and civic journosphere reported on Wednesday evening with a revelation that the Maryland Transit Adminstration’s bus tracking project had been ‘hacked’ to ‘save Baltimore $600,000 in one day.’ Hyperbole ensued, and if you aren’t familiar with the story, it can be summed up in the following quotes from The Transit App and the MTA’s rebuttal:

Disclaimer: The content of this post is purely the opinion of the author, and not of any current or previous employer. I have not spoken with the Maryland Transportation Authority or The Transit App before writing this.

The tech and civic journosphere reported on Wednesday evening with a revelation that the Maryland Transit Adminstration’s bus tracking project had been ‘hacked’ to ‘save Baltimore $600,000 in one day.’ Hyperbole ensued, and if you aren’t familiar with the story, it can be summed up in the following quotes from The Transit App and the MTA’s rebuttal:

Baltimore’s data wasn’t made available in a developer-friendly format…This means that Baltimore’s real-time tracking data isn’t compatible with the most popular commuter apps… When reporters asked the MTA why they opted to only show the info on their mobile webpage … the MTA responded that it would have been too expensive.

Why are we still working on it? Well, our data is not in GTFS-RT format. (… General Transit Feed Specification-Real Time – is [a] data format used by developers to make transit apps.) …Our CAD/AVL system pre-dates Google. That’s why GTFS-RT was never a requirement… The cost to convert our CAD/AVL data prior to the development of the interface was going to cost MD taxpayers an additional $600,000.

I’d like to applaud both sides for being civil. Many similar discussions have devolved into the realm of toxicity. What I’ve found lacking in this discussion are nuance and actual lessons to be learned for the industry as a whole. That’s why I’m throwing my hat in the ring.
Continue reading “Much ado about open data”