Transitmix (YC W15) Cuts the Paper Out of Bus Route Planning
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Article says that you all don't have prior experience in transit. Are you learning from your early adopters as you go?
How much and how often do agencies re-plan their routes?
How much of planning is driven by politics vs driven by data?
What positions you all vs the consultancies who do planning? Would you expect consultants to be your customers or competitors?
Yup, we talk to them daily. And they keep sending us love notes. Public transit professionals are some of the nicest people you'll ever meet.
> How much and how often do agencies re-plan their routes?
Generally they'll look at changes a couple times a year. But we're at a unique time where many cities haven't changed their networks in decades, and are going through a big redesign process.
> How much of planning is driven by politics vs driven by data?
Like anything else in .gov, some combination. Our goal is to push it heavily in the data direction.
> What positions you all vs the consultancies who do planning? Would you expect consultants to be your customers or competitors?
We're a set of tools to helps pros out -- we don't do the planning ourselves. Plenty of consultancies are already using us.
I recall living in Seattle around the time the light rail route was being planned. It seemed to be about 80% political. And so you meander through everywhere before you get to a useful destination. Like transit systems which stop short of an airport.... Or take the circuitous route to the airport...
(And, not that it's exactly germane to the topic, but I also happen to be the maintainer of OneBusAway for iOS.)
The transitions are so seamless that you can disembark and accidently end up on the train platform without even trying.
Two of the worst are in the USA: Honolulu and SFO.
Honolulu has the ideal topology for a light rail (straight line from airport to Waikiki), but won't build a light rail to the airport because then all of the taxi drivers would become unemployable.
SFO is breathtakingly bad. Just try transferring the first time from Caltrain => BART San Bruno => BART SFO on a cold weekday to really appreciate how awful it is. I just tell people to take a taxi from Millbrae.
Today, planners use some scary excel sheets to try to figure this out. They are scary enough that most don't.
Definitely on our list of things to tackle.
I saw a screenshot of one of the CapMetro routes in Austin on your homepage. Have you been working with CapMetro recently?
Some friends and I have been working on a web app[0] to make it easier to see where the buses and trains are in real-time, and ideally get more people to ride them. We've been emailing CapMetro a lot to resolve issues with the GTFS data and the new GTFS-RT API and they're pretty responsive.
We'll be at Interactive so hopefully we can chat for a bit.