Smartphones + “shared” cars = better urban living

The days of wondering when — or whether — your bus will show up may be nearing an end if you live in one of America’s more progressive metropolitan areas. For those who live in fairly dense urban areas, the need to own a car will be diminishing, too.

Those two trends, both favorable to urban living, were highlighted in transportation discussions during the annual conference of the Regional Plan Association of New York (RPA) April 16.

In recent years, transit operators in Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, British Columbia, Washington, DC, and elsewhere have equipped rail connections and some bus stops with “countdown clocks” — electronic displays that tell how soon the next train or bus will arrive at a particular location.

The latest advance, said Christopher Dempsey of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT), involves having a transit agency release a feed of raw data about bus, train, and other services to for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Programmers in those organizations then figure out how to make the information accessible — on the Internet, smartphones, and other devices — at little or no cost to transit operators.

Last November the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), which serves the Boston area, released “a real-time location and prediction feed for five of the busiest bus lines in the system,” Dempsey said.
• Within an hour, an application (“app”) using the information was placed on Google Earth, giving real-time location of buses on those lines.
• In two days, a programmer created a web page that tracks the buses’ movements.
• In five weeks, the data was on apps for iPhones and Android phones.
• In seven weeks, the data was available for delivery to any phone.
• Using that information, some shops near transit stops started installing their own countdown clocks; they have LED displays that tell customers (and passersby) how soon the next bus will arrive.

From a cost-efficiency standpoint, the idea of releasing raw data to outside organizations is extremely attractive. Neither MBTA nor MassDOT had to pay programmers or businesses in the private or nonprofit sectors to assemble or present the transit information. By contrast, it can cost the MBTA roughly $10,000 to install a countdown sign at a bus stop that’s not already supplied with electricity, Dempsey estimated.

At a bus shelter that already has electrical power, the cost would be much lower — perhaps $500 for the electronic display and its housing, plus a few hundred dollars for installation and soft costs, Patrick Siegman of Nelson\Nygaard consultants estimated when contacted by New Urban News.

By the end of this summer, Dempsey expects a real-time data feed will be made available for all of the MBTA’s buses — about 1,000 vehicles. He credited transit operators such as Tri-Met in the Portland area and BART in the San Francisco area with pioneering such systems.

One popular technology, called NextBus, is a vehicle tracking system that uses global positioning satellite (GPS) information to produce projected arrival times for all the stops in a bus system.
In San Francisco and Seattle, some transit riders get real-time information on their wristwatches. In one such arrangement, an Android device is connected to a Bluetooth watch. Departure information, alarms, and next-stop information are sent to the watch. “It’s better to get it on your wrist than on a countdown sign,” Dempsey contends.

Smartphones for all?
A Nielsen Company report found that 21 percent of American wireless subscribers had smartphones by late 2009 and that 49 percent of Americans will have them by the third quarter of 2011. An April 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 48 percent of African-Americans have used a mobile device to access the Internet.

“Transit riders have a higher adoption of smartphones” than Americans as a whole, Dempsey says. In Chicago, where the Chicago Transit Authority is installing a data feed that reports on every bus, “28 percent of their riders have smartphones,” he said. ”We think smartphones will be as ubiquitous as cellphones are now. The cost is coming down.” Also, there are websites that are free.

“The effect of these programs,” says Jeffrey Tumlin of Nelson\Nygaard, “has been to significantly increase rider satisfaction with transit” because people know how soon their ride will show up, and can plan accordingly.

“Unfortunately,” says Joe Hughes, developer of a transit app in San Francisco, “many transit agencies still make it hard for [software] developers to access their timetable and arrival information, so they and their riders can’t benefit from applications like this.”

“Technology on the transportation side is a game-changer, or [at least] it will help us get through the next decade,” Scott Belcher, president of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, said during the RPA conference. “States, cities, and transportation organizations are going to be financially strapped” for the next several years, he said. Technology can help offset their budget difficulties.

New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said installation of GPS systems in all the taxicabs in the New York “allows us to monitor traffic flows, bottlenecks, and pedestrian safety.” She observed that GPS is being used to facilitate bike-sharing in San Antonio, and she said that in New York, because of GPS, “we will be able to remotely control traffic signals and give priority to buses.”

Car-sharing will benefit cities
What’s emerging, said Belcher, is a revolution in traveler information, which will help people ”find options other than driving a car” and will enable them to learn about costs, sustainability, and availability.

Technology is helping Zipcar, the nation’s largest car-sharing service, with more than 350,000 dues-paying members, to make its vehicles available on a convenient basis. Mark Norman, president of Zipcar, said that in some Boston neighborhoods, 25 percent of the residents have Zipcar memberships.

Nearby rent-by-the-hour vehicles that can be unlocked with a company-supplied card are helping, he said, to reduce car ownership and lessen the demand for parking spaces. This can enhance the compactness and physical character of cities.

According to Norman, membership in Zipcar, which places its vehicles in locations close to homes and workplaces, is associated with 40 percent of the members selling a car or avoiding buying one. It allows members to reduce their vehicle miles traveled by 70 percent, and it has made it possible for members to cut their transportation expenses by $600 per month. Zipcar members, he said, pay only about 6 percent of their income for transportation — far less than the typical American.

The company claims that each Zipcar “takes over 15-20 personally owned vehicles off the road.” (Tumlin says studies overall have estimated that each vehicle in a car-sharing program takes 7 to 25 private vehicles off the road.) The more ubiquitous that car-sharing becomes, the greater the reduction in private vehicles. In addition, the company says, “Members of Zipcar and car-sharing programs report a 47 percent increase in public transit trips, a 10 percent increase in bicycling trips, and a 26 percent increase in walking trips.”  

Norman forecast that eventually there will be more Americans who have access to vehicles through car-sharing services (or “fractional ownership,” as he called it) than directly owning a car. 

Streetsblog reviewed many services involving San Francisco transit times and smartphones, at http://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/04/12/whats-the-best-smartphone-app-for-checking-muni-arrival-times/.