From 511CC:

“511 Contra Costa is proud to announce the release of its very first iPhone app – iSmog!

iSmog displays air quality information for the San Francisco Bay Area. With just a tap of the screen, users will see an easy-to-understand map of environmental quality in the Bay Area’s five air basins, built using data provided by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). With this information, commuters can make more informed choices about environmentally friendly transportation options, and members of sensitive groups will be better able to stay abreast of information that can be, literally, life-or-death.

Push notification alerts users with allergies or other environmental sensitivities when the air contains unhealthy levels of contaminants including ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and two sizes of particulate matter, all precursors of ozone. Notifications can be customized by level of sensitivity and by geographic area.”

On the city’s end, CitySourced bundles the reports, sorts by type and maps them.  Cities pay CitySourced an annual fee for the privilege of receiving the data.

Currently in San Francisco you can call 311 (or twitter them) to report issues to the city or get information, but the cost of staffing a hotline is high.  The San Francisco MTA estimated that 41 percent of calls to 311 were for transit information and the average cost per call was $1.96.  At the time, this was more than the actual fare for a bus ride. 

I’m not sure how much the annual fee for using CitySourced is (San Jose apparently just signed up) but its got to be less than the cost of staffing a call center. As more people get smart phones this type of application will become more useful and will lower the costs of reporting & fixing issues while providing more timely information.

Kevin Rose & Michael Arrington seem to like this startup as well, see the TechCrunch writeup, the interview with TechCrunch or Kevin Rose on his thoughts on CitySourced (5:10).

Freeway traffic had been a feature of google maps for a while, but providing traffic conditions on non-freeways is especially useful for travel within SF as most car trips don’t involve travel on a freeway. San Francisco has removed several freeways in recent years, freeways are useful for getting to/from the city but not as much for travel within the city.

The traffic data is actually crowdsourced from people sharing their location from google maps for mobile, read more on the google blog. I’m not sure if this includes iphone users as we can’t run background apps.

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?

For some reason I’m subscribed to their newsletter, and a few news items came over the transom.

First, they’ll be opening up a DC office to lobby federal, state, and local agencies to adopt their technology.  The guy who runs it is named Jason Conley, and, apparently, he used to work for the Dept. of Homeland Security. Scary.

Even scarier?  You can even pick up “ghosts” along route.  I quote from the email:

“Ghosts are simulated riders that request transport as you drive along your favorite routes. They are easy to recognize by their names, which always end in “RIP”. You can pick up, drop off and rate ghost riders as you would with real people. The only difference is that the ghosts don’t pay with real money.

Currently, the areas where most ghosts have been spotted include Washington D.C., New Jersey and Miami.”

About what I’d expect from a former DHS guy (just kidding).  In all seriousness, this might just take off.

Thanks Eli Horne for bringing this to our attention.

The first one, a little bit of overkill if you ask me, was designed by an Irish company called Avego.  From the looks of it, people who are willing to share rides have to drive around with their phones on the dashboard, and an online interface allows people who need a lift to find vehicles close-by, even if they don’t have a phone themselves.  Neat idea, but at 30 cents a mile, the business model strikes me as, well, un-American.

The Avego rules clearly state “Radios, if on, play jazz, classical music or “mild” news. Avoid talk radio.” That seems a little strict to me, I don’t know of any taxis that have that rule.

The other services seems to have developed a little more traction in San Francisco.  Even if their website kind of sucks, Carticipate looks like it has the advantage over Avego because of it’s simplicity: instead of having to remember to have your phone on all the time, you post, Craigslist-style, what you’ve got and search for what you need.  Plus, it’s free.

Has anyone out their used either of these apps?  A penny (or 30 cents) for your thoughts.