Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	532
Event Title:	Social Media and Public Transportation
Event Date:	Jan 24 2012 10:15AM- 12:00PM
Event Location:	Hilton, Jefferson West
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Next Steps in Transit Rider Information: Development of Webapp for Personalized Transit Service Alerts (12-1647)

In the midst of operating their service, transit agencies must continually respond to situations such as construction, detours, accidents, severe weather, or special events. Response to these events often comes in the form of temporary service modifications such as reroutes, skipped stops, or canceled service. Agencies are going a better job of alerting riders to such modifications by using more types of media, including email, web, text-message and social media. Currently, these alerts are usually sent out for an entire agency or an entire route. While clearly better than no alerts, the result for riders can be a firehouse of information, most of it not relevant to their own trips. For this initiative, the OneBusAway team worked with agencies in the Pacific Northwest to develop a web application and SIRI data repeater to allow the entry and reporting of service alert data in a standard format that enables capturing, sharing, and linking it to other real-time information sources. This paper describes the project context, the web application and repeater, and a prototype rider tool that makes use of these customized service alerts. The goal of this effort is to help agencies to be able to specify targeted alerts for specific stops, routes, trips, vehicles, and combinations thereof, so that riders receive only the information they want and need.

Authors
     Watkins, Kari Edison, Georgia Institute of Technology
     Ferris, Brian , University of Washington
     Hallenbeck, Mark E., University of Washington
     Borning, Alan , University of Washington