SFAppeal wrote a great article detailing the hurdles of trying to get real time info from a public transit agency.

In the case of San Franciso Muni, they claim to own the data and also the desire for the public to access that. A Muni representative even mentioned that they want to provide their real time arrival data in an easy to access format.

Unfortunately, the data is collected by Nextbus and a completely separate company confusingly named Nextbus Information Systems claims to own the data and offers it for a modest fee of “tens of thousands of dollars per month” to any independent developers who might want to build applications using it. There seems to be a real disagreement between Muni, Nextbus, and Nextbus Information Systems about who owns real time transit data and how developers should or shouldn’t be able to access the data.

Instead of letting us see when our buses are coming, NBIS locked the arrival times in an imaginary vending machine. This would be like if advertising giant Clear Channel waltzed into the subway stations, tore down all the Muni maps, and then offered to sell them back to you at a steep markup.

NextBus Information Systems was responsible for shutting down the Routesy iphone application and apparently keeps close tabs on who is scraping data from the nextbus site for their own applications and then tries to shut them down. The threat of having to pay for expensive licenses has made us at BlinkTag focus our development efforts around BART and Trimet, both of which provide easy to access, developer friendly real time data. I wonder how many other apps have been shutdown or scrapped before launch. Are there other cities that have realtime data that is available online but not available for developers to use?

You’d think it would be easy to change the stacking order of things you overlay in Google Maps, right? Like, no one wants that stupid AC Transit logo to go underneath the polygon they drew . . . . . you’d think . . . .

Anyways, after like five or six hours of poking around on forums I found a solution.

First, it turns out that overlays on Google Maps have both a ZIndex and a “GPane” associated with them. If you change the ZIndex, you change the order in which objects on the same pane are displayed. Turns out that polygons and ground overlays (like the AC Transit image) are automatically added to the same pane, so no help there.

Here’s the magic. Google lets you create custom overlay classes, where you can specify GPanes for individual images or whatever. But it looks really hard, and I’m lazy.

So I stole this js class that does basically what I want. Just replace the following snippit of code

map.getPane(1).appendChild(div);

with this one

map.getPane(Some higher number, like 7).appendChild(div);

and you’re good to go.

Via The Transportationist:

In Michigan, miles of deteriorated rural roads that need repaving have been reverted to gravel. According to WWMT:

The county estimates it takes about $10,000 to grind up a mile of pavement and put down gravel. It takes more than $100,000 to repave a mile of road.

Saving $90,000 per mile on underused rural roads could help in rebuilding other deteriorating infrastructure. It could be a way of channeling much needed transportation funding from rural areas to cities which have generally had under-investment in infrastructure compared to rural areas. I’m curious about the annual maintenance costs though, I’m imagining gravel has a higher ongoing maintenance cost and has to be re-graveled more frequently. Also, areas with heavy snowfall and frequent plowing could see much of their gravel plowed away each winter.

I’ve spent time driving in rural Iowa, where gravel roads are common and they work fine. I’ve also driven on highways in Cambodia, where the potholes from previously paved roads are so large the can swallow cars (most traffic veers off of the road into the ditch on a dirt path). My sense is gravel would have been a better choice there.

A unified fare payment medium will go a long way in unifying the Bay Area’s highly fragmented, 28-agency transit system. From a user perspective, needing to know fare rules and exact change for multiple transit systems makes the daily commute tricky and makes non-routine transit trips to new areas an exercise in information systems research.

Translink is a “one-card to rule them all” approach to replace the existing system monthly passes, paper tickets, magnetic strips and exact change. The system was proposed back in 1993, and and is currently in place for AC Transit, MUNI, and Golden Gate. Twenty-Eight transit systems each with their own schedules, fares and terminology for passes (Eco Pass, EZRider, Fast Pass, etc) doesn’t really make riding transit easier.

Recently, BART hinted that they might be ready to roll out TransLink as soon as a year from now, which would put that in mid-2010. London’s had a system-wide Oyster Card in 2003 and Hong Kong’s Octopus Card launched to the public in 1997.

Lawsuits and vendor issues have stalled BARTs adoption of Translink, and it seems like the recent launch BARTs own EZRider smart card will only serve to confuse riders. Recently, the issue of fare revenue “float” has led to the establishment of a BART specific “e-purse”. (Will I need an “e-purse” to ride “E-BART“)

Hopefully BART will get TransLink rolled out by the Oyster Cards 10 year anniversary and before the next siginificant fare payment technology replaces RFID. Rumors are flying around that a “Soft launch” of TransLink on BART may happen soon, meaning it might just start working without them telling anyone about it.. We’ll post an update here with our results if this happens.

Our good friend, consultant and roommate, Jason Wolfe, is interning at Willow Garage, a robotics research group in Silicon Valley. They recently achieved a significant milestone in robotics: their PR2 alpha robot was able to “navigate through eight doors, and plug its power cord into nine outlets”. The company is striving to create a “mechanical personal assistant” that can do basic household tasks and fetch beer. See video below:

The New York Times picked up on this and wrote a good article explaining the achievement. They mentioned that this robot would be able to navigate any building designed to meet the Americans with Disabilities act as these buildings have ramps around all steps and doors with non-round knobs which simplifies the door opening process.

I wonder if the lawmakers who drafted ADA considered that easier access to public spaces would also allow easier robot access to these same spaces.

To our loyal blog readers – this isn’t quite ready for production, but I wanted to explore BART’s new open data feed and do something fun.

Comments, thoughts, appreciated. A few known issues:

We’re still working on getting the real time feed up. Soon.

The design isn’t great. We’ll be rolling out new ways to visualize the data soon, and include an extra layer showing stations.

Via TechCrunch:

Apple may be known for its advertising prowess, but this little marketing coup is going to go down as one of the most hilarious ad placements in recent history. doubleTwist, the company co-founded by renowned software reverse engineer DVD Jon, has managed to place a banner for its product directly next to the main entrance to Apple’s flagship San Francisco store.
Read the rest on TechCrunch

In San Francisco, there is a BART entrance right below Apple’s flagship store. Its one of the more urban BART station entrances, it reminds me more of something you’d see in New York or London than SF with most stations having entrances in the middle of the sidewalk instead of embedded into a building.

Apparently, the window of this BART entrance hasn’t been used before for advertising, but with buget cuts, I’d imagine transit agencies are looking for new sources of revenue and every surface is a potential ad space. This space must be particularly valuable and I find it very impressive that the first ad that got put there was for a product that will allow moving of an itunes library to a non-apple device.

The ad is well done and blends nicely with the Apple store, i wonder how many Union Square shoppers will visit doubletwist.com thinking it has been sanctioned by Apple.