This is a cross-post from the Trillium blog.

Last Saturday, I presented at the Wheels of Change conference in Humboldt County, CA by video conference. I traveled about one mile to my office to give the presentation, instead of traveling 700 miles from Portland to Arcata and back. That's a lot of carbon not emitted!

Humboldt County was roughly the 17th area in North America to join Google Transit. Green Wheels helped to make this happen by advocating for the project, and then supporting its success by testing early previews of the trip planner. Since launch, the main transit agency, Redwood Transit System, has posted a greater than 40% increase in ridership. They have one of the best farebox return ratios of any rural transit system in California.

Now there are more than 115 North American areas include in Google's transit trip planner. It's exciting to see and report this progress.

The audience was particularly interested in future possibilities for online transportation information. I showed Walkscore.com's transit time maps, ByCycle.org, and Atlanta's multi-modal trip planer, among other projects.

I am excited and interested to see how for-profit companies, advocacy groups, and public agencies can keep working together. There is a lot of potential for innovation in these sorts of partnerships.

Slide deck below.