Atomic Taco, Flickr, Creative Commons.
DCL
Not long ago, I wrote about how cities that open up their transit data were bringing public transportation into the 21st century and making the system better at a very low cost (they just release the data -- other people build the apps at not cost to the city). A good example of this is the new Transit Score, an online app by the people who brought us the Walk Score.
They use open data to calculate a particular's spot's Transit Score. They currently cover more than 40 cities where the public transit agencies provide their data in an open format (over 100 transit agencies right now). You can either write your address or just the name of the city, and the algorithm will calculate how "transit friendly" that place is by looking at how many buses and trains are close by, how far you'd have to walk to get there, the frequency between buses and trains, etc. Based on that, it gives you a score between 1 and 100, from :"Minimal Transit" to "Rider's Paradise".
transit-score-500x.jpg
Photo: Flickr, CC
You can do the same for the "Walk Score", but this is calculated based on the things that are walking distance from where you are.
This is useful to learn more about where you are, but the best use of this is probably to find out more about a city you are about to visit, or where you are considering moving. It would be bad to get there and realize that there's not way to get anywhere except by car.
There's no doubt that our future must include more public transportation, so we need to get serious about making it better. One way to force that is to make data more transparent so that people can build on that platform and do things that the transit agencies would never have had the resources to do.
See also our post about the original Walk Score on which the Transit Score is based.
Via Transit Score, Grist
