I really like a new post on the Urbanophile blog.  It's by a private consultant on how the "networked" and "open" approach to collaboration and communication is allowing government agencies, organizations, and citizens to accomplish new and different things:

I don't like shopping at Whole Foods in Portland (and haven't for several months).  I miss the Co-op in Arcata.

But one thing I did appreciate was that they have transit timetables, maps and passes not only available at the store, but prominently advertised on the door.

TriMet tickets and passes are available at many businesses throughout the city.  Their business programs page includes other partnership opportunities.

This is a cross-post from the Trillium Solutions blog.

While iPhone users benefit from built-in transit directions, iPod touch users can feel left out on the curb.

However, until the iPod touch incorporates transit directions (and I hope it will), there is another option — UniBus for iPod touch and iPhone. Unibus is a $1.99 app that allows you to look up arrivals and departures for many transit systems that make their GTFS publicly available, including those of two Trillium clients, agencies in Humboldt County, California, and Mountain Line in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Since the schedule information is downloaded to the device, network access is not required to lookup schedule information.

More information is available from the UniBus website. Below, a screenshot of the app.

I discovered this app through the Headway Wiki. Thanks to Joe Hughes for establishing this resource.

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.

This is cross-posted over at the Trillium blog (my company).

Humboldt Transit Authority's participation with Google Transit attracted the attention of the local T.V. news station recently. KIEM Channel 3 (Eureka, CA) reporter Scott Hurst covered Humboldt Transit Authority, Trillium and Google Transit recently.

Here’s the 1-and-a-half minute segment.

A few musings from up north, inspired by 60,000 free bike maps: A look at Transportation Options' survey results (BikePortland.org).

Of course I like anything that recognizes information as a big component of delivering mobility options.

Reading this made me think of the recent advocacy themed issue of More Riders Magazine that featured stories of advocacy organizations being hired by government bureaus to do information outreach -- because they could be so effective at it.

If Green Wheels could convince local governments of the usefulness and efficiency of contracting out sustainable mobility information programs (which really don't exist yet) to Green Wheels, I think Green Wheels could probably do this efficiently and very effectively.  This would be a great way to create mode shift, generate revenue for Green Wheels, and, in so doing, make more conversations between government / advocacy / citizens / transportation users happen.

Do you remember how Google Transit used to show lines that traveled straight between bus stop locations, even right across the bay (I called it the trans-Humboldt Bay tunnel)?

No more. [Click the image to read more.]

Note: I borrowed the title for this post from Joe Hughes's blog.

The reason I bought an iPhone was an early-October rumor that the Google Transit trip planner, and walking directions, were going to become part of the iPhone's mapping application with the 2.2 software update.

Sure enough, in late November, it happened.

And, it's great.

At September's Transit Camp Bay Area, I met Simon Ilyushchenko from Google, who was analyzing fatal U.S. collision data.  He recently posted some of his findings and I thought I'd pass them along.

You can get everything from The Days are Numbered blog: Fatal US car collisions, 2005-2007.  The Google Earth view (linked on the page) has separate layers that show pedestrian and bicycle accidents.

After discovering Wordle, a tool for creating beautiful tag coulds, through Planetizen, I just had to have something to put it to use for.  Here's a look at the Bay District's Redwood Marine Terminal Business Plan.  Larger words mean they occur more frequently.  I still can't find "railroad" in there, which occurs 13 times in the document.

What else can you think of to use this with?  If you have a tag cloud you'd like to share, send it.