Comments on: Unraveling the Transit Fabric

By: alper

alper — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:58:34 +0000

Thanks, do you have more info on the various concessiehouders in the Netherlands?

We could lobby them and see if we can persuade them. I’ve pretty much given up on our transit providers doing anything except serve vested interests.

By: Joris

Joris — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 13:33:48 +0000

This is an excellent post! I’ve had the idea for open public transportinformation for some time now. To be honest, the 9292 information is quite good compared to information in other countries but mobile sites and applications could just be so much more innovative. I understand from a business perspective, the transport companies want to control the information; that’s why I hope the politicians (specifically: consessiehouders) that largely control the funding, can be a facilitator here.

By: alper

alper — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:04:30 +0000

@Kars: I’ve read it a while back and I get that seams are the points to design for.

Regarding payment in transit like I described above: the system should show you what you are paying for and how much, it should show you alternatives and it even should let you opt out of the system completely if you so wish (I can imagine paper tickets being in use indefinitely for a very small minority).

But when I’m in a hurry or busy and I don’t want to be bothered with any of this stuff, yes it should be seamless.

By: alper

alper — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:54:37 +0000

@Iskander, Like packet switching on the internet? Once we achieve the fluidity I describe above, we could then see if it would be indeed more efficient to build up transport incrementally in an ad-hoc fashion and we would also have the JIT information to be able to implement such a system.

By: Iskander

Iskander — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:02:48 +0000

Great thoughts!

It pops in my mind what would happen if the whole model of scheduled transport is replaced with incremental transport. Where we can catch the positions of all specific vehicles out of the cloud and calculate the real journeys… Seamless

But that would not easy to monopolize so we will probably have to live with the delayed model for some time…

By: Kars

Kars — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:11:51 +0000

I think this post by Adam Greenfield towards the end summarizes most of what I was thinking when I commented earlier:

"This term was coined by the late Mark Weiser, a pioneer of ubiquitous computing and the Chief Technologist at what was at the time the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Instead of the discourse of smooth, distinction-obliterating, disempowering seamlessness which was then (and is to a significant degree still) dominant in discussions of ubiquitous information processing systems, Weiser wanted to offer users ways to reach into and configure the systems they encountered; ideally, such seams would afford moments of pleasure, revelation and beauty."

The whole thing is worth a read, by the way, if you haven't already.

By: alper

alper — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:08:11 +0000

The link you point to gives me a ton of academia but no workable definition of seamful. I get your point though —I think— but if you could expose more on the subject it might be useful. I don’t think it helps discourse if the both of us say: “We think we know what we both mean.”

I got an offer to move to AMS with a friend. If you have an offer in Utrecht, I’ll put it forward, but I think my friend will be a hard sell.

By: Kars

Kars — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:59:52 +0000

Good stuff, Alper. One minor point: you’re making the case for seamless payment, and I know what you mean by that, but at the same time, I think you’d want payment to be seamful, right?

What’s that about moving to AMS though, I thought you were going to come to Utrecht?

By: alper

alper — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:35:06 +0000

Thanks, and cool!

Yeah, I think the amount of waste currently in this domain is staggering. Just pushing the data into Google Transit would hugely enable my iPhone to do some very cool things.

An agenda and a campaign are necessary. In 5 years we’ll all have GPS enabled phones (among other devices) and we can brute force the problem, but I’d rather we didn’t have to wait and didn’t have to go that far.

I didn’t know Karzoo.nl existed (I wanted to build this). The execution looks fine, but the site is pretty much dead.

By: Peter Robinett

Peter Robinett — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 22:14:50 +0000

Alper, this was a very interesting post. In terms of getting started on this agenda right now I think opening up transit data and incorporating additional forms of transit are the low hanging fruit.

I think it’s wrong that 9292ov, essentially a public service, is run like (actually as?) a for profit company. This approach leads them, for instance, to not make their database of public transport information readily available, which I know has created problems for mashup developers.

As for additional forms of transit, I would imagine that that it shouldn’t be _too_ hard to plug into taxi companies’ dispatching services and carpooling services like Karzoo.nl.