I think its actually a useful app, its quick and uses geolocation to grab your location making it one click (after you load the page) to generate a walking tour. It has links to google streetview and offers an elevation profile of the walk and optimizes the route to hit as many points of interest in as little distance as possible. It uses google maps walking directions for the base layer, and it seems to do pretty well with knowing pedestrian paths throughout the city.

I plan to add a few more features in the near future – I didn’t have time to add everything I imagined during the overnight coding challenge:

• Some way to specify what types of points of interest you’d like to walk by
• A way to specify roughly how long of a tour you’d like
• More crazy points of interest based on my experience in SF
• Extend it to work in other cities where I can get enough points of interest, perhaps using SimpleGeo Places API
• A way to save your walk so you can come back to it later
• Descriptions of the points of interest

The code is on github – its currently all client-side using jquery mobile and google maps API, google Fusion tables and other google APIs. Please fork it and add your own ideas or connect it to a different fusion table with your own set of points of interest.

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 gave an Ignite talk titled “How to ask your neighbor for a cup of car” at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg was even in the house (although we didn’t notice him there until after the talks).

Click here for Brendan’s summary of different car sharing services, smarter parking, and taxi and car services that all enable people to forego the traditional model of car ownership.

BlinkTag co-founder Jed ran a session on Sunday on extending GTFS (Google Transit Feed Specification).  Three representatives from Google were at the meeting and they were very supportive and able to field a number of questions from developers and representatives of AC Transit and BART.

A few interesting takeaways:

• Google’s process for officially extending the GTFS spec (http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html) is fairly straightforward.  In short, a developer must propose an idea to an agency and implement it, demonstrating proof of concept, before Google will consider extending their schema.  More information can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/gtfs-changes/
• GTFS cannot be everything to every agency – one of its chief selling points is its simplicity and the limited number of attributes necessary to support a credible routing algorithm.  While individual agencies are obviously free to use the base spec for their own purposes (run-cutting or printing time tables, for example), Google has an interest in keeping the feed single-purpose and uncluttered.
• One important new concept that was discussed was the idea of adding a pathways.txt file, which will describe pedestrian routing within a station.  Other possible extensions to the feed included additional attribution for routes (ridership, additional mode types) and other ways to describe fare and payment systems.

On Saturday, Melissa Jordan of BART and Trucy led a session on how public agencies could use social media to more effectively engage their customers. The presentation centered on what social media tool to use and when, as well as what kinds of content to post and how it should be delivered. Additional discussions touched upon legal and liability issues with interactions that occur via Twitter and Facebook between a public agency and a customer. And Subway Crush SubMate.

Trucy Phan of BlinkTag and Melissa Jordan of BART head a discussion on public engagement with social media at Transportation Camp West on March 19, 2011

Takeaway points:

• Research what social media outlets might be most effective for your organization; make sure your message is reaching the right audience.
• Know your audience. What you think is cool may surprisingly differ from what your audience thinks.
• Once you start using social media, be careful of how you build and manage your brand.
• Have fun, and interact with your customers. Information that goes two ways is better than you just pushing information one way.

Also on Saturday, Ruth Miller led a discussion on Bay Area Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects. Participants discussed common misconceptions about the Van Ness, Geary, and East Bay proposals, and generated a diverse list of implementable strategies to build supportive coalitions and more effectively represent existing supporters.

In a followup session on Sunday, Ruth and her Walk Oakland Bike Oakland colleague Danny Snyder joined Ben Kaufman and Rob Boden of the San Francisco Transit Riders Union to bring the transportation advocacy discussion to the regional level.

Photos via transportationcamp on Flickr

Carsharing

City Carshare

• San Francisco Bay Area Only
• Compared to Zipcar: Cheaper per hour, more per mile – good for shorter distance trips within SF, Berkeley and Oakland
• 179 locations, 313 cars
• $5.50/hr $.35/mile (depending on plan)
• http://citycarshare.com

Zipcar

• Many Location Nationwide
• Compared to City Carshare: Better for longer distance, shorter duration trips (running to San Jose and back)
• 231 locations, 810 cars in the Bay Area
• $7.50 – $12/hr (depending on plan)
• http://zipcar.com

RelayRides

• Started in Cambridge, MA in 2009
• Launched in San Francisco, Dec 2010
• Currently free to join
• Smart-card based
• 21 cars in the Bay Area (and growing)
• $5-$11/hr on average
• $5M Series A 3/7/2011 by Google Ventures
• http://relayrides.com

GetAround

• Launched in San Francisco, Jan 2011
• Currently free to Join, nearly instant approval via Facebook Connect
• Supports in person key exchange and iPhone unlock
• 96 cars (and growing)
• Diverse array of cars including a Tesla and a Porche 911 Carrara
• $5-$15/hr on average
• http://getaround.com

Smarter Parking

Park Circa

• Launched in Jan 2011
• Find and reserve a spot via iphone app
• $1-$3/hr
• http://parkcirca.com

Primo Spot

• Launched in 2008
• Supports New York, Boston and Seattle
• Shows legal on street parking based on side of street and current time.
• http://primospot.com

Taxis and Car Service

Cabulous

• Works worldwide – most cars in San Francisco and San Diego
• No prepayment required
• Shows real time taxi locations, hail one and watch it come to you
• Website and iPhone app
• Bottom-up approach – any driver can use, doesn’t need fleet approval
• http://cabulous.com

Taxi Magic

• Supports many major US cities including SF
• Trip is paid via app
• iPhone, Android, Blackberry app only
• Top-down approach – only certain taxi companies are available
• http://taximagic.com

Uber

• Car Service (fancy cars)
• San Francisco and Palo Alto
• Trip is paid via app
• iPhone and Android only
• 1.5 X the cost of a cab
• Very fast, professional and reliable service
• http://uber.com

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.