View the documentation & data on MUNIs site.

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).

Time posted a good video interview with Burning Man founder Larry Harvey about 5 things all cities could learn from burning man.

In summary:

• Ban the automobile
• Encourage self-reliance
• Rethink commerce
• Use shame to foster virtue
• Encourage art

Shame is definitely not part of the city planning toolkit I learned about, but I’d agree that these things can be useful concepts outside of the Nevada desert.

For a historic look at the layout of Black Rock City and how it developed, this article by BRC planner Rod Garrett is worth a look. The overlay of Black Rock City on central San Francisco is particularly interesting:

The theme for Burning Man 2010 is “Metropolis: The Life of Cities” (Aug 30-Sep 6, 2010) so I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the lessons that cities can learn from burning man as next year’s event approaches.

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.

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 articles, and the BG didn’t say anything about the design.)

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?

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.

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 trial pedestrian plaza:

Finally, San Francisco is now closer to considering a carfree Market Street:

I’m excited about the funky tower and the upcoming funky tower district. The plans include restaurants and improvements to the redwood grove and Mark Twain alley at the bottom of the Transamerica Pyramid. The twisty tower is reminiscent of the new De Young museum in Golden Gate park.

Twisty Tower

View the full EIR.

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 planner friends is that the very low volume of ped traffic on 17th makes this a less than ideal choice. But I’ll bet that it’ll pick up pretty quick, what with all the traffic between the suntanning salon and Twin Peaks bar . . . .

Credit where credit is due – even though one of our roommates works for the city, I found this on the always information Streetsblog.

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 MTC is making noise about actually fixing the problems of route overlap, uncoordinated planning, and general inefficiency in our public transportation network. Maybe the new plans will work better than Translink did. One can hope.

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.

Armed with a 1353 page environmental impact report that claims biking is good for environment, the city is now gearing up to proceed with much needed improvements. The public comment period ended on Jan 13, 2009 which might mean at some point this year we’ll see the beginnings of 34 miles of bike lanes, improved intersections, signage and much more.

Meanwhile, there has been talk of eliminating car traffic on Market Street, eliminating bike lanes on part of Market Street (what?), and charging all vehicle traffic in the central part of the city. Its going to be interesting to follow all of this.