Here's the proposition: take public transit agency staff and boardmembers, transit activists, riders, hackers and geeks, and put them all in a room together with little or no set agenda and see what happens. A risky list of ingredients, you say?  Well, the recipe has worked successfully several times now for TransitCampBayArea, TransitCampBayArea2, and for the Toronto Transit Camp.

February 2008 - the first Transit Camp — brought me 5 hours south to the SF Bay Area into thick rain and fog. The first and only rule of the camp had me charmed me from the beginning:

"TransitCampBayArea is not a complaints department, it is a SOLUTIONS PLAYGROUND. …People who break this rule will be asked to come up with solutions...if they cannot, they may be asked to leave so that the rest of us can."

The rule helped: there weren't any lengthy debates, blaming and complaining. I felt that the agency staff who were there were genuinely appreciative and excited about what hackers and activists were accomplishing, and that they may have been inspired to work to make transit data available in more usable formats. Not only do agency folks see some of what hackers and activists are accomplishing, but since Transit Camp is a participatory and solutions-oriented event, they actually experience the culture. At the same time, non-agency participants came away with a new understanding of the challenges that individuals in agency bureaucracies face to making transit better and making more data available. Here's my more complete report of the February TransitCampBayArea and Joe Hughes's.

September's TransitCampBayArea2 was a similar success. A one-day only event this time, fewer elected officials and agency staff showed up (maybe because it's a busy election season), so that limited cross-dialogue opportunities a little bit. Props to the folks from Caltrain, BART, SF Muni, and MTC/511 who were there.

One exciting element element of this Transit Camp was to see the progress made since last Transit Camp. I enjoyed meeting Tim Moore and Melissa Jordan, BART's web-team, and learning more about what they've accomplished. BART was among the first agencies to make their Google Transit Feed Spec schedule data publicly accessible. Since the last TransitCamp, BART has launched a beautiful new website, made real-time arrival information available in a standardized format so people can build useful mobile apps that tell people when their train will arrive, or incorporate the data into public kiosks or websites. Before this feed was available, I helped the Bay Crossings team jerry-rig a screen-scraper to provide the data for their beautiful displays at Embarcadero and other stations. Since BART has made real-time info available in an XML format, BART data can be shown on these displays with more reliability and at lower cost.

Many people there commented on how the BART Twitter feed is both fun and useful. BART is a huge part of Bay Area life and culture, and its great to see the BART web team representing and celebrating the culture of public transportation.

Discussion with Melissa & Tim from BART in full swing.

Much of what BART is doing is similar to what TriMet in Portland, OR, is doing (described in my interview with TriMet's CTO and Manager of GIS and location based services, Innovations in Transit Data Publishing).  Very few agencies are doing this.  Abd the Twitter feed and their efforts to represent and express the culture of BART, I think, are very unique.  It would sure be great to interview Tim & Melissa, too, and publish something!  Anyone?

One of the most interesting presentations, for me, was Brandon Martin-Anderson's on his open source Graphserver, an open-source multi-modal trip planner. Multi-modal trip planning refers to being able to query for a trip and have combined walking & transit, walking & biking directions, or, maybe even rideshare options returned. And Brandon's Graphserver is ready to be incorporated into custom trip planners or other applications.

Portland-area shortest path tree visualization from Graphserver. Red is transit. Black is bicycling.

Speaking of multi-modal trip planners, Peter Smith, who started the Google Maps 'Bike There' Feature Request petition, was there too. Based on the popularity of the petition, it seems there is a lot of demand for a bicycle trip planner, and Brandon's software, coupled with Open Street Map offers some of the tools for people and groups to begin building their own.

Successful online ridematching is another sort of holy grail for many advocates / geeks. It's hard not to feel that there should be opportunity to improve things with all those empty seats in single-occupant vehicles (did you know average vehicle occupancy is 1.5 passengers, or 1.1 passengers for urban commute hour traffic?). Sean O'Sullivan showed us Avego, one of the latest efforts to take advantage of our increased connectivity to help people share rides and save money. The model and the pitch here is unique: Avego stated aim is to extend the public transportation network. Drivers use an iPhone application to map their regular commute or other routes, and then that traveled path becomes a sort of regular fixed route that potential riders can query for. Ride connections, pick-ups and payment are all negotiated by mobile phone. Leading out of the Avego discussion, the TripML discussion continued to continue groping towards technical standards, but more importantly, establish the basis for partnerships and cooperation that will establish that critical mass of people necessary to make it work, instead of spreading rides and riders around on so many dynamic rideshare sites.

I couldn't attend everything; there were so many other sessions. Here's to hoping and working towards Transit Camp ideas moving forward, and for more Transit Camps in the Bay Area and elsewhere to share new ones.

The schedule.