ACT Workshop at Caltech

Hi everyone,

This morning, I am leading a workshop with Juan called "Creating your presence on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn". The workshop is for the southern California chapter of the Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT), the trade association for TDM and rideshare professionals.

You can check out a PDF of the presentation here: http://jmatute.googlepages.com/ACTWorkshop.pdf

The presentation goes through the basics of the three social networking sites and brings up good examples of how people are using these sites to disseminate information to commuters.

Sirinya

Metro Releases Schedule Data in Google Format - Google Transit to Follow!

Last week, Metro quietly published a developer site to publicly release GTFS data (the backbone of Google Transit) at http://developer.metro.net.

Today, they announced it in a press release: L.A. Metro Releases Transit Data to Spur Applications Development and Grow Ridership. In the release, they say the Developer Site "is one of a number of exciting interactive developments that will be announced in the coming weeks."

This can only mean one thing, that Metro will soon be on Google Transit. I know that there are some upcoming schedule changes because of the new Gold Line Extension, so that may complicate the release of schedule data, but I would expect Los Angeles to be able to use Google Transit in the next month or so. Of course, if this doesn't happen we'll tell you what you can do to apply pressure.

Join the Los Angeles Wants Google Transit Facebook Group to keep updated on the push for Google Transit.

Metro Board meeting on Long Range Transportation Plan this Thursday

Thursday is a crucial step in making sure the Wilshire Subway is funded. Measure R provided the funds for additional transit projects like the Subway to UCLA. The Wilshire Subway is currently in second place on a long list of projects to be funded with Measure R funds. On Thursday, the board will finalize which projects make the cut, and how they are prioritized. Having Wilshire Subway supporters will help the politicians make the right decision - to fund the Wilshire Subway, which will have the maximum benefit not only for UCLA and the Westside but all of Los Angeles.

Join Bruins for Traffic Relief on Thursday at 1pm at the Metro Board Meeting adjacent to Union Station. You can take the bus or subway to Union Station. Check Metro's Trip Planner for instructions on how to get there on transit. Just remember that the subway will bring the trip time from Westwood to Union station to around 30 minutes, and enable you to take subway transit to go downtown, Hollywood, and many other places giving you a more holistic experience of Los Angeles and all the things it has to offer.

If you are a UCLA student, staff, faculty, or affiliate, please wear school colors to show your support.

• More info on the Long Range Transportation Plan
• LRTP Board Meeting Agenda

Using Metro on the Smartphone

For the past few weeks I've been playing around with Rapid on the Cell and the cell phone version of Metro's Trip Planner as part of my ongoing look at how new mobile technologies can help people better interact with public transit. A lack of information is a big barrier to transit use for choice riders. The internet has revolutionized the availability of transit information - no longer do people have to have paper copies of time tables and route maps to figure out how to get around.

However, as the internet becomes more mobile with laptops, cells, and smart phones, it seems Metro has not kept up. Metro currently has two mobile offerings, TripPlanner and RapidBus.net.

A screenshot taken by Sirinya of the Rapid on the Cell site while she was tracking the whereabouts of the next 720 from her home computer for Juan

Rapidbus.net allows visitors to read the same next bus displays at Metro Rapid (7-series) stops, but from their web-enabled cell or computer. As frequent transit users know, the information provided by these screens is not the most accurate.

One downfall of the line I frequently use, the 720, is that there is no option to see when the next bus is arriving at stops in Santa Monica. I assume this is because there are no inductive loops for signal priority in Santa Monica, which I believe drives the Next Bus times. One additional downside of using the inductive loops in the asphalt rather than GPS positioning is that the first stop for which next bus information is available often reads "Unavailable" until a bus is only a few minutes away.

All in all, Rapidbus.net is a useful tool that can help users minimize wait time at bus stops. I used it to get home from downtown late Saturday night, and was able to arrive at my stop only 3 minutes before the bus arrived. At the time, the 720 was operating with 15 minute headways. One downside of Rapidbus.net is that, at least on my cellphone (a Blackberry 8820), it does not enable deep linking. Deep linking would be useful if a user wanted to save a bookmark of nextbus information for a stop they frequented (work or home) and didn't want to spend the minute or so it takes to navigate the Rapidbus site to find the next bus information.

On the cell, a user must click links for "MTA" (the first one, not the 2nd of the two MTA's available), then the line they wish to travel on, the direction they wish to travel, then the stop they wish to view information for. The computer version is more user friendly.

One additional errata is the presence of a Sepulveda stop on the 720. The stop is actually at Bonsall, 400 yards away.

Using Trip Planner on the cell is a bit more difficult. Trip Planner online is notorious for errors. Luckily, TripPlanner on the cell can provide useful information for users who have figured out how to use the site. The trick is knowing Metro's convention for cross streets, which is a "/" rather than a "&". If you use a & which is the convention on Google Maps, you'll never find what you're looking for.

Once you get past that part, you have to verify that TripPlanner understood your intersections correctly. Then it gives you some options of what bus to take. If you're not familiar with different routes, this can be difficult, especially if you're not familiar with the difference between two or more bus numbers which use the same route (920/720/20). Eventually, it's possible to figure out what time the next bus is scheduled to arrive. This is useful information.

One huge drawback to TripPlanner on the computer by phone is that it doesn't include owl service. I found this out when using TripPlanner on my cell to come back home from a night out at Karaoke in Korea Town. It was around 1 in the morning, but TripPlanner showed the next trip at 4:38 in the morning. Because PDFs don't load well on my cell, I couldn't access the time tables. I had to call a friend to find out when the next 20 bus might be coming.

At the time, I wasn't aware of NextTrip, which is accessible by clicking "Riding Metro" and then "Metro Bus" on the mobile site. This would only have been a viable option since I knew which line I wanted to take and which stops I wanted to use.

Both of Rapidbus and TripPlanner on the cell have shortcomings, but are useful to a patient user who has some degree of bus riding experience. I'm looking forward to the one day, very soon, when Google Transit rolls out in the Los Angeles area. After that, many other good things will happen.

Using Google Transit on Google Maps for Mobile

Lack of information is a barrier to using transit. To go somewhere, you have to know how to get there. In a car, you have maps and potentially a GPS device. For transit in LA, you have Trip Planner, time tables, and a stylish, but not geographically representative, map of routes and lines. These resources are hard for a visitor or first time transit rider to find, nonetheless figure out in a little over an hour.

Luckily, in San Francisco , BART and Muni are on Google Transit. While I was up there last weekend, I documented an hour of using my Blackberry 8820 with GPS, and Google Transit on Google Maps for Mobile to navigate the city.

I had some time to kill, so I decided to get some Dim Sum in Chinatown. I'm unfamiliar with San Francisco, so I used Yelp, an online review site, to find a good place to go. I went to their mobile site and searched for "dim sum" in Chinatown, San Francisco, CA. In the first page of results, I found a place with 4 stars called Delicious Dim Sum, which was what I was looking for.

I then searched for "Delicious Dim Sum" on Google Maps for Mobile and found out how to get there using transit. There was a bus departing from two blocks away in just a few minutes.

Google Transit showed me how to walk there:

What the bus stop looked like:

And what time the bus was leaving:

I hopped on the 9X to go to Chinatown.

While I was in transit, my Cousin sent me a text telling me that he and his brother would be grabbing beers before the Giants game near AT&T Park. I told them I'd be there around 6.

I hopped off the bus in Chinatown and walked about a block to Delicious Dim Sum.

And it was delicious:

While eating the pork bun, I searched for the 21st Amendment Brewery on Google Maps for Mobile and found transit directions to get there. I had to walk a few blocks down Jackson Street to get to the stop.

When I got to the stop, Muni's next bus sign not only let me know how long I would be waiting

but also that Muni was subject to state cuts to transit operating funds and what I could do to learn more.

I got on the bus, and had about 20 minutes in transit, so I used my blackbery to update my facebook status

and check the news back home.

I was also able to follow my progress along the route:

(I'm at the blue dot, the route is the blue line, green diamond is beginning, red diamond is destination, orange diamonds are embarkation and disembarkation)

When I got off the bus I had a short walk:

and then I grabbed a beer with my cousins:

.

I did all of this in about an hour and 15 minutes. I was unfamiliar with the system (I event tried to use my declining balance BART ticket on Muni), but Google Transit made it easy to figure out.

Want experiences like this in LA? Join the effort to get Metro and the munis on Google Transit by joinining the Los Angeles Wants Google Transit Facebook group.

More than intent needed to ride Gold Line extension

I applaud the Gold Line Construction Authority and Citrus's College student efforts to raise the attention of public transportation investments in the Foothill corridor. However, their "I will ride" campaign should be an "I would ride" campaign. Students support the proposed line as, it would serve the Citrus College campus. These students probably easily envision walking, biking, or driving to a gold line station, taking the line to Citrus Ave, then walking the 1/3 to 1/2 mile to their destination on campus. However, most of these students will be gone in two years. If the these students and the Gold Line's supporters really want to ride the line, they should lobby their local city councils for land use policies which support light rail use, so that they will have ample reason and opportunity to ride when the Gold Line extension is built.

People travel because they want to get from here to there. There would be no sense in riding the Gold Line extension if it does not go where the supporters want to go. No one with a car at their disposal wants to upwards of walk a mile and a half to and from a station to get to their final destination. Thus, it is critical to concentrate housing, jobs, and places people want to go near the future stations, so that someone can get on the train in Glendora and go grab dinner and watch a movie in Claremont. If the “heres” and “theres” in the future Foothill Corridor are not near proposed Gold Line stations, then fixed-route light rail would be difficult to use for such a trip.

For light rail to have enough “heres” and “theres” around stations to be viable (still subsidized by local sales and property taxes, but high enough ridership to offer frequent service), the area around the stations should have roughly twenty housing units per acre. This type of land use allows people to buy or rent near a station so that they easily take advantage of all benefits the line has to offer. With fewer people living near stations, generally a line would require such a high subsidy to operate (at least 4 to and as much as 10 times the price of a ticket), that during times of budget cuts the line’s operator would not be able to offer frequent enough service to get people on the train. No one wants to wait 30 minutes to take a train. Those who did want to near stations would have to pay higher prices for rent and houses because of the low supply of housing in the area.

A previous generation of Citrus College students missed a great opportunity to promote the land uses necessary to give residents access to the light rail line. The Rosedale master-planned community is a new 518-acre neighborhood currently under construction right across the street from Citrus College and adjacent to the proposed Gold Line station at Citrus Ave. When completed, the neighborhood will have about 2.5 houses per acre – far below what will be needed to, in the future, house even a fraction of the 28,000 students currently attending colleges within 1/2 a mile of a proposed station.

Notes & Links from Metro ETC Meeting

On 4/21 Sirinya gave a presentation on using new media to market alternative modes to a group of Employee Transportation Coordinators at Metro

NOTES

¤People want to feel connected, even if it is remotely through online social networking

¤To change travel behavior – and ultimately, that is what ETCs seek to do – you have to figure out how to reach out to your target population

¤If your target population is a cohort that is educated, technologically savvy, then you have to meet them through their social mediums

¤You have to create buzz – give people something to talk about – and online social networking tools can help you do that.

¤Finally: Online social networking, Web 2.0, and other options have the potential to provide useful information when alternative mode commuters want or need it.

LINKS

¤Bruins for Traffic Facebook Group

¤Tinyurl.com/bruinsfortrafficrelief

¤Measure R campaign

¤See our pictures at www.tinyurl.com/btr-pictures

¤Los Angeles Wants Google Transit

¤Tinyurl.com/lawantsgoogletransit

¤Facebook www.facebook.com

¤Twitter www.twitter.com

¤www.twitter.com/bikecar

¤www.twitter.com/caltrain

¤First tweet about Miracle on Hudson: http://twitpic.com/135xa

¤Google Products

¤Google Transit www.google.com/transit

¤Google Latitude www.google.com/latitude

¤Google Maps www.maps.google.com

¤San Francisco Webcam Network

¤http://www.apple.com/webapps/travel/thesanfranciscowebcamnetwork.html

¤Online ridematching meets social networking

¤Zimride: http://apps.facebook.com/carpool

¤PickupPal: www.pickuppal.com

¤Carticipate: www.tinyurl.com/carticipate

¤Copy of the presentation

Transit-oriented adventure to Thai Town

On Sunday, Juan and I used the 720 and the Red Line to get up to Thai Town for the 2nd annual Curry Festival, which was organized by the Thai Community Development Center. (Disclosure: I was an intern there in 2003!)

For starters, we were super excited to see that Metro had indeed phased out paper day passes. Instead, we got reusable TAP cards. But what to do with them? After all, right now, Juan and I each have our own, although they're not activated right now since we didn't pay for quarterly passes through UCLA.

I insisted that Juan take a picture of these Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies. They were on the train to verify everyone had paid. Note: They carry around these scanners, which can detect whether you tapped your pass prior to boarding.

As we exited the train, I noticed several Metro employees standing by the ticket vending machines and the maps. Following last year's event, MetroRiderLA had written about his experience trying to obtain a ticket inside the Hollywood/Western station on his way back. (The article was entitled, "Thai New Years Festival Exposes Success, Failures at Metro"). It took over 30 minutes because of the large crowds attempting to figure out the two ticket machines. Back then, I commented that the high number of choice riders in this crowd exemplified the need for Metro to bring staffers into the station to help out, especially since Metro's subway stations are technically unstaffed. (But don't try to evade the sheriffs.)

So I went up to talk to these people, and I told them about MetroRiderLA's blog entry, and they seemed a little incredulous (like they'd been told that last year had large crowds, but hadn't heard it yet from an actual constituent). Then I made Juan take this picture to document it:

As for the actual event itself, it was busy, hot (thanks to the heat island effect), and wonderful. We recruited our friend Will Trevor to join us. He has a hearty appetite, which enabled us to sample more food. As a dental student, he was also super excited to see that this is how Bangluck Market stocks its Dental Care Center:

Of course, no transportation blog would be complete without these pictures:

While Metro had its staffers answer questions from choice riders and field questions and ideas from attendees on an exhibit, LAPD was out in force to make sure the people felt safe in various modes. They included this Segway.

So while ordinary Americans weren't buying American-made cars, the LAPD was buying up whatever the rental car companies didn't want.

Exhibit A: Late 2000s Ford Mustang

Exhibit B: A freaking Hummer!

Seriously. Seriously! What on EARTH??? To me, the Hummer exemplifies excess and everything that is wrong with the Big Three and America. Here we are, telling people to take public transit to an event, and then we feature a freaking Hummer?!???

Newsflash to LAPD: Ditch the Hummer ASAP.

-Sirinya