Opportunistic Transport Data Collection
Dimitrios Efthymiou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, presenter Constantinos Antoniou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, presenter
In this paper, four studies that have been conducted using open-data are presented. The sources of open-data that have been used, are: 1) Governmental portals, 2) Volunteered organizations, 3) Web-scrappers and 4) Social media. The results are scientifically interesting, and the authors suggest the usage of these methodologies for data collection and the open-
data sources to the transport research community.
|
P13-5867
| A01 |
Visualizing Performance of Transportation Systems
Eric Fischer, Oakland, California, presenter
Making real-time vehicle location and parking occupancy data available through a public API gives unprecedented opportunities for members of the general public to evaluate the performance of transportation systems and check whether changes that have been made to these systems have had the intended effect. In the San Francisco Bay Area, NextBus, SFPark, and Cabspotting have made it possible to understand the locations of habitual bottlenecks in bus service, the limits of possible bus performance without dedicated lanes and signal priority, the effectiveness of congestion pricing on the Bay Bridge, the impact on bus performance of road diets, traffic signal retimings, two-way conversions, temporary lane closures, and replacing parking lanes with streetside retail, the impact of all-door boarding on bus stop dwell times, the variation in traffic speeds at different times of day, the likelihood of being able to catch a taxi in different neighborhoods, and the limitations of pricing as a mechanism for causing parking turnover.
|
P13-5872
| A03 |
Using Open Data and Geographic Information Systems to Rank Potential Commuter Rail Infill Station Sites
Ted Rosenbaum, LTK Engineering Services, presenter Emily Novick, None, presenter Dylan S. Bunch, None, presenter
When trying to convince transit agencies of the merit of potential capital expenditures, many members of the public have turned to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to show evidence of their claim. These arguments are made stronger with the introduction of deep, accurate, open source data. Using data from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (the regional planning organization), the City of Chicago data portal, and the Chicago Police Department, the authors present a ranking of four potential sites for an infill rail station along the Metra Electric District line. At a higher level, a comparison is made between data which was manually entered and that which already existed in a usable open format. The effect different data formats have on this type of project is explored, especially as Chicago (and other cities) release previously closed data. Although the program used in this analysis (ArcGIS) is proprietary, free open source programs with similar capabilities are available for use by the general public, so that this type of analysis may be performed entirely with open source tools and data.
|
P13-5874
| A05 |
MTA Bus Time
Jeff Maki, OpenPlans, presenter Sheldon Brown, Cambridge Systematics, presenter
MTA Bus Time (http://bustime.mta.info) is the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority's official realtime bus customer information system, scheduled to be deployed to the entire city of New York by the end of 2013. What goes unseen when looking at the website, however, is a clever use of both open data and machine learning/statistical computation to deliver the functionality of a traditional AVL much faster, at a fraction of the cost.
Topics to be covered further in the poster:
*The provision of realtime bus data to third-party developers via an open SIRI API.
*The use of GTFS as a key operational artefact in the MTA Bus Time system.
*The use of open standards to create a "platform" other projects, internal and from other vendors, can be built upon.
*The use of cloud-computing to externalize the operation of the system almost completely to contractors, with data as a key area of exchange.
*The low-/no-change nature of the bus operator's procedure as a key benefit, allowing the system to be useful on day 1.
*The novel approach of using a particle filter to match "noisy" data to the published schedule, permitting the use of commodity hardware that is not purpose-built for CAD/AVL systems.
MTA Bus Time is a project being co-developed by the NY MTA, OpenPlans and Cambridge
Systematics.
|
P13-6346
| A07 |
Crowdsourced Mapping for Bikesharing: New York City, Cincinnati, and Chicago
Frank Hebbert, OpenPlans, presenter Neil Freeman, New York City Department of Transportation, presenter Robin Lester Kenton, New York City Department of Transportation, presenter Scott Lekovish, Alta Planning + Design, presenter Alley Hector, Alta Planning + Design, presenter Mark de la Vergne, Sam Schwartz Engineering, presenter
Where do you want a bike share station?
Bike share is becoming a popular mode of transportation in the United States and around the world. More and more cities are planning or offering bike share systems of different scales. Using online crowdsourced mapping, city agencies and planning firms can easily collect extensive public input for suggested locations.
OpenPlans created several bike share maps, using Shareabouts, an open source crowdsourcing mapping tool. We collaborated with the NYCDOT in New York City (http://a841-tfpweb.nyc.gov/bikeshare/suggestion-archive/), Alta Planning + Design in Cincinnati(http://cincybikesharestationmap.com/), and Sam Schwartz Engineering and CDOT in Chicago.
So far, thousands of residents used these maps to suggest locations for bike share stations, explain their choice, and support suggestions made by others. The maps complement public outreach efforts by providing the public with an additional way to give their input.
Topics to be covered further in the poster, based on the NYC, Cincinnati and Chicago maps:
*How crowdsourced mapping supports the bike share planning process
*How the data is used for meaningful action
*Open source and OpenPlans’ role in the process
|
P13-6361
| A09 |
Street View Data Collection Tools
Aaron Ogle, OpenPlans, presenter
Google Street View is the largest, publicly available collection of street imagery in existence. The question we asked was, “What can this teach us about cities?” At OpenPlans, we’ve developed two new tools for place evaluation in planning, using Google Street View. Beautiful Streets compares a pair of randomly selected streets, and Fitzgerald gathers written comments on a specific street.
Can Street View allow us to measure the qualitative aspects of a city? Is it beautiful? Does it feel safe walking here? Beautiful Streets (http://beautiful.st) is a tool that uses pairwise comparisons to measure the beauty of a city by asking a simple question - "Which is more beautiful? The one of the left or right?".
Can Street View help us more easily and transparently collect and share quantitative data about streets? Street data is typically crowdsourced through maps but often lacks specificity and context. Fitzgerald (http://demo.planningpress.org) is a tool that allows data collection on the back drop of Street View, which allows data collectors to have a "boots on the ground" perspective, 360 degree context, and specificity to point out things in three dimensions.
|
P13-6368
| A11 |
OTP Analyst
Andrew Byrd, OpenPlans, presenter Matt Conway, OpenPlans, presenter David Emory, OpenPlans, presenter Kevin Webb, Conveyal, presenter
This poster examines how the open source OpenTripPlanner (OTP) multimodal trip planning package can be used in conjunction with open transit and street network data to visualize and understand urban mobility and accessibility. OTP’s original role was in passenger information and point-to-point itinerary planning. However, the recently developed Analyst components (http://analyst.opentripplanner.org/) expand OTP’s range of applications into the areas of spatial analysis, urban planning, accessibility research, and transportation engineering.
Modifications to the trip planning algorithm allow one to rapidly evaluate travel time and other characteristics of trips to any (or all) points in the coverage region, given an origin point and other routing parameters. Location-based outputs include travel time maps presented as vector isochrones or raster tiles. Results for many origin or destination points may be combined to iteratively construct more complex indicators. Examples include cumulative opportunity accessibility measures, time-space prisms, and maps of travel time variation due to changes in scheduled service or operating conditions. Additional data can be incorporated using custom aggregation functions.
Spatial analysis with OTP can enable data-driven decision making in areas as diverse as transportation policy, real estate, and personal or commercial relocation, using an ever-increasing quantity of open transportation data. For more examples, see: http://bit.ly/NSXGCd
|
P13-6039
| B02 |
OpenStreetMap-Based Bike Planner
Kevin Webb, Conveyal, presenter
BikePlanner.org (http://bikeplanner.org/) is a public bicycle trip planning tool for the Washington, DC metro area. The site is built using OpenTripPlanner, an open source multi-modal routing system, and data from the community-driven OpenStreetMap (OSM) database. OSM contains information about bicycle facilities, including both on- and off-street bike infrastructure and access restrictions. Data in OSM is contributed by volunteers from around the globe. This project examines ways to encourage contribution from the local bicycle community (riders, advocates and government staff) to improve the accuracy and completeness the OSM basemap.
Topics covered in this poster:
*Use of OpenStreetMap as a basemap for bicycle trip planning
*Encouraging community input to improve mapping of bicycle facilities
*Techniques and considerations in the mapping of bicycle hazards
*Inclusion of real-time availability data from bicycle-share systems in bicycle trip planning
|
P13-6339
| B04 |
Getting Started with Open Data
Sarah Kaufman, Rudin Center, New York University, presenter
Getting Started with Open Data is a guide for transportation agencies that would like to release their schedule data and administrative records to the public, and need an introduction to the practice. This guide is intended to result in streamlined use of transportation services and promote a productive dialogue between agencies and their constituents. It has been released as a living document, intended for input from both transportation data owners and users, to result in the most complete open transportation data guide possible.
|
P13-6369
| B06 |
Opening Transportation Data for Innovative Applications
Kristen Baldwin, U.S. Department of Transportation, presenter Dan Morgan, U.S. Department of Transportation, presenter
No abstract available
|
P13-6371
| B08 |
Open Data and Unleashing Local Innovation at Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
Joshua K Robin, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, presenter
Traditionally, transit agencies have provided real-time transit information to riders via “1st party” agency signage, apps, and websites. While these solutions do provide quality information, they come with significant implementation and maintenance costs. In an era of ever constrained budgets, the MBTA looked to deliver information to customers at a low implementation and maintenance cost. Following the model of traffic and weather information, the MBTA decided to “open” its data to software developers at no cost. Within just hours of releasing the data, developers we building iOS, Android, and Blackberry applications. Today, more than 55 applications have been developed.
|
P13-6403
| B10 |
Leveraging the New and Improved RIP Database Interface
Lisa Loyo, Transportation Research Board, presenter William McLeod, Transportation Research Board, presenter
The Transportation Research Board’s Research In Progress Database (RIP) recently received a makeover and has an improved, modernized interface to facilitate searching the database and sharing of search results. Learn about using the new interface to search RIP using tools such as an interactive map to locate records by geographic area; and, learn about the new features for managing and sharing of search results. RIP contains current or recently completed transportation research projects, and most of the projects are funded by Federal and State Departments of Transportation. University transportation center research is also included in the database. On the horizon is a new, streamlined data entry process for RIP contributors. Organizations that do not contribute to RIP may be interested in learning how they may participate.
|
P13-6719
| B12 |