Puzzlepieces – tag ‘transit’

I’ve oft-critisized the TTC (well, its management) in private for practices such as not opening up their data (in GTFS). Toronto’s transit agency is now the main holdout in the area. Actually, only one of the agencies has made their data truly public, the others have given it exclusively to Google. Anyhow, here’s an idea that would help them redeem themselves.

I noticed a few months ago that in a very large number of TTC subway cars, the maps, of which there are typically several per car, were entirely missing. It was pointed out to me that these are stolen frequently. So, here’s the brilliant idea. Sell the TTC maps.

TTC should send out a press release to the local media (couple of radio stations, the free newspapers that everyone reads on the subway already, etc.) announcing that a limited run of 200 of the maps will be sold the following week from the ticket both at the Bloor/Yonge station, for $15. No further advertising is needed, not even a little poster at the ticket booth. The media loves TTC stories, and this one will certainly be reported. All 200 will be sold within the first few days, at which point the TTC can put out a second press release bragging about the incredible demand and that they ran out far faster than expected, and will consider expanding sales and perhaps making them available at other stations as well.

The TTC will make money off this (profit from sales, plus reduced theft costs; not much, but they need whatever they can get), gain regard, and all at almost no work at all. The maps should be printed as-is, no need to make a consumer version of them or package them in any way. The only con I can think of is that the maps are probably not quite able to fit through the tiny window in the ticket booths that is normally used to pass money and tickets/tokens back and forth; I’ll leave this minor problem up to the TTC to figure out.

For those interested, you can see the TTC map (and a user-created similar map) on ahk2chan, an interactive map on the TTC site, and a Chinese version.

Gas purchases plummet | | TerraPass: Fight global warming, promote alternative energy - sometimes I forget that people can change

cityofsound: Transport informatics - insanely comprehensive overview of today’s status on data and transportation systems

I started writing this post a few weeks ago and have mostly forgotten what I was going to write about. whups…

Headway Wiki is a great wiki for public transit data, which accompanies the Headway blog. I added some links for Waterloo, Toronto, and Seattle.

It is great seeing that some cities are opening up their data in a somewhat standard format, although I wish everyone would. Governments trying to keep their data private is almost universally pointless and counter-productive. Google Transit seems to be the best generalized transit trip planner (on the other hand, there seem to be several new ones I haven’t explored), although sites targeted to specific cities often offer a lot more.

Unfortunately I missed out on the first Metronauts unconference, Metronauts being an expansion of TorontoTransitCamp. The wiki is sorta all over the place, but I guess moving from unconferences to major projects takes time.

Inscribed in the living tile: Type in the Toronto subway (Joe Clark) - I read just about all of this, so I must be crazy. As much as I’d like the TTC to fix the signage problem (I wouldn’t mind trying to fix it myself, I’ve certainly had problems with it), signage seems to be the least of the TTC’s problems these days.

Toronto Transit Camp - extremely cool idea. I’m not sure if I can attend (nor do I have a lot to contribute at the moment), but I am looking forward to the results.