As part of the Google IO Last Call contest I created Walksy.com. Its a mobile app that will create an on-the-fly walking tour of San Francisco with up to 8 stops based on points of interest that I specified. It ended up working pretty well and won me a ticket to Google IO. I think [...]
This weekend, BlinkTag attended Transportation Camp West 2011, held at Public Works in San Francisco, CA. Here are summaries of what each of us presented: Brendan Nee (Car sharing and P2P parking services) Jed Horne (Extending GTFS) Trucy Phan (How public agencies can use social media) Ruth Miller (BRT, transportation advocacy) Saturday night, BlinkTag co-founder Brendan [...]
I gave a 5 minute talk at Ignite #transpo for Transportation Camp on Saturday night at the awesome Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 (Thanks WordPress!). It was titled “How to Ask your Neighbor for a cup of car” and it covered Peer-to-peer carsharing, peer-to-peer parking sharing and “smart taxis”. I mentioned a lot of new [...]
Jed and I are at Datacamp SF #cadata today. MUNI announced at the event that their real time arrival information is now open and free for developers to access. Its the same data that powers nextmuni. A while back we wrote a post complaining that this data wasn’t available. We’re excited about open transit data [...]
CitySourced launched today at the TechCrunch50. Its a website & iphone, Blackberry & Android app that allows users to submit notes and pictures about issues directly to city government. This could be anything from potholes to graffiti to unsafe pavement conditions on bike routes. On the city’s end, CitySourced bundles the reports, sorts by type [...]
Each year Jed, Brendan and much of the BlinkTag staff take a trip to Black Rock City, NV for Burning Man. As a city planner & transportation person, its interesting to spend a week in a temporary city of 50,000 that gets recreated every year with no cars or commerce. Time posted a good video [...]
Google maps added traffic conditions on local streets today. A map of San Francisco shows traffic on South Van Ness near the Blinktag Office as medium, actually the street is rarely congested, it just has a lot of stop lights so you can rarely go “fast” even with no other vehicles. Freeway traffic had been [...]
Congratulations to our client The San Francisco Bay View for being named Best of the Bay 2008! Now 35 years old, the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s annual list of San Francisco’s coolest stuff has yet to include a BlinkTag project – until now! (Credit where credit is due: we don’t actually write any of the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Both New York and San Francisco, there are streets closing to create new pedestrian plazas. New York has begun closing parts of Broadway in Times Square and Herald Square on weekends to create additional pedestrian space in these busy areas. San Francisco recently closed part of 17th Street at Market in the Castro as a [...]
CurbedSF reports that a new residential development in the financial district might mark the start of the new “funky tower district”. The FiDi needs more people on the street outside of work hours to activate the vacant streets, patronize the restaurants and businesses and bank at the hundreds of ATMs scattered throughout. I’m excited about [...]
Looks like we’re finally earning out keep as the capital of the Left Coast. New York has one-upped us for too long on reappropriating unused asphalt (thanks to that pesky Janette Sadik-Khan), but San Francisco just unveiled plans for its first street pedstrianization project, at the corner of 17th and Market. The opinion among my [...]
Maybe spreading common sense ideas and stating the obvious is a way for San Francisco’s most widely read fishwrapper to avoid the fate of other dailies, but I guess it’s good that they finally figured it out: MAYBE HAVING 26 TRANSIT AGENCIES IS BAD FOR BAY AREA COMMUTERS. Like, duh. Sarcasm aside, turns out that [...]
For those of you who’ve ever wondered why the dividing line between the Mission and SOMA is so janky. It’s cool living in an area where people bother to keep track of this stuff.
We here at Blinktag use our bikes as the preferred mode of transport (we’ve even got a company tandem thanks to Preston). Aside from the hills, San Francisco is very conducive to cycling given its reasonable climate, dense layout and culture that embraces all things alternative, including modes. However, for over 2.5 years the city’s [...]
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