FleetBeat

In the News: TriMet Debuts Open Trip Planner

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Though it’s still in the beta phase, Portland’s TriMet Open Trip Planner represents a large step forward for transit passengers who want to use the internet to plan a trip across the city.  The planner lets travelers select a starting or ending date and time and then enter the parameters of their trip, which can include:

• Quickest Trip / Safest Trip / Fewest Transfers
• Maximum Walk (incrementally from a tenth of a mile to 30 miles)
• Wheelchair accessibility (Yes / No)
• Travel by Transit / Bus and Train / Bus Only / Train Only / Walk Only / Bicycle Only / Bicycle and Transit

In addition, the Open Trip Planner also reads information from the U.S. Geological Survey Data Set and can tell travelers the ascent/descent of their planned trip, a feature that will be particularly handy for cyclists. 

But perhaps the best feature of all is that Trimet’s new trip planner is completely open source, meaning that agencies from around the world will be able to use it, and keep improving it, for free. And 3^rd party developers will be able to use it for developing any type of smartphone app they can think up. 

To read BikePortland.org’s article on the announcement of the trip planner, click here. 

The TriMet Open Trip Planner test site (still in beta) can be found here.

Public Transit Schedules on Google Maps

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

For many public transit agencies, the route scheduling process is time consuming and prone to errors. Functions such as changes in services levels, route optimization and accurate reporting are difficult to do efficiently. There is also increasing pressure from customers who want online options for trip planning like those available with Google Maps Transit.

Scheduling software can make this process much easier, with electronic worksheets, automatic schedule validation to prevent mistakes, and a simple, clear overview of data for route optimization. Unfortunately, most scheduling software is prohibitively expensive for small- to mid-sized transit agencies. In addition, producing the data required to get schedules on Google Maps can require increasing development/technical staff resources and a significant investment in time and money – something that we all seem to have less of these days.

However, there are some affordable options for small and mid-sized agencies. Here’s a short demo of scheduling software with a one-click Google-compatible export feature that makes putting schedules on Google Maps simple, and it won’t break your budget either. Click here to watch now.