IBM Turns Cell Phones Into Sensors to Monitor Public Transit

Posted on May 23, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Ryan Gerhart | PSFK

Everyone knows that when a company gathers personal information about you, via cookies on the web or settings on your smartphone, they’re likely to sell that information. Then, you end up on the receiving end of much unwanted contact, emails, phone calls, etc, from the company that bought the data. But what if this data sharing among companies could work to your advantage?

In theory, that’s exactly what IBM’s trying to do.

In an effort to improve urban development and public transportation, an IBM research team worked together with the telecom company Orange to tackle some of the service issues with bus routes in the Ivory Coast. Working around the nation’s largest city, Abidjan, Orange released 2.5 billion call records from five million cell phone users in the Ivory Coast. (The records were cleaned of personal identity before release).

IBM was then able to take this unprecedented mass of mobile data, and essentially turn cell phones into sensors and measuring sticks (conjuring images of the Joker-location system from The Dark Knight. Don’t worry – it’s not). IBM was able to use data such as aggregate communication between towers, mobility traces for location and movement, and categorical identifiers that indicate larger population trends.

IBM-bus-routes

While the data is rough due to phone capabilities and use-frequency in less-industrialized nations, IBM was still able to use this unique strategy to better inform urban development with more efficient bus routes. For example, of the possible improvements found, the team suggested that

adding two routes and extending an existing one would do the most to optimize the system, with a 10 percent time savings for commuters.

The project also holds greater implications for mobile-data-driven research. Francesco Calabrese, a researcher and coauthor of the report for IBM, thinks

This represents a new front with a potentially large impact on improving urban transportation systems . . . People with cell phones can serve as sensors and be the building blocks of development efforts.

The records used for this pseudo urban planning project are months old, and not very useful for predicting what may happen once the improvements are put in place. However, this certainly appears to be a promising start in using non-descript mobile data for improved urban interaction. If the model could eventually be adapted to make use of real-time data, life in the fast lane will get that much faster. {…}

Ohio budget passed by House would bar young students from taking public transportation to school: Michael K. McIntyre’s Tipoff

Posted on May 23, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Michael McIntyre | Cleveland.com

School districts and public transit agencies in Ohio were baffled recently to come across an addition to the state’s school transportation law in the state budget approved by the Ohio House of Representatives that reads: “No transportation to or from school of pupils in grades kindergarten through five shall be provided by way of transit buses.”

Districts generally transport students on school buses, but some — particularly urban districts — contract with public transit agencies for some students.

Outlawing that, say transit and schools lobbyists, would be a big hassle.

Photo: Cleveland Plains-Dealer

Schools testified this week before an Ohio Senate subcommittee considering the House’s budget. They said the restriction on public transit would be costly for cash-strapped districts that would have to buy more buses and hire more drivers.

Barbara Shaner, Associate Executive Director for the Ohio Association of School Business Officials, testified: “While we understand the perception of this practice may not be a positive one, school districts have successfully utilized public transportation options for students for many years. Student safety is always the highest priority.”

In Cleveland, eliminating public transportation for K-5 students would disproportionately hurt the nearly 4,000 homeless students and those who move around the district, estimated at 30 percent of the student population, said Roseanne Canfora, spokeswoman for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District schools. Kids that age are provided traditional yellow buses, unless they have no permanent address. Those kids rely on public transportation.

“A provision like this would be devastating to these students’ ability to get to school,” she said. Public transit systems would lose, too.

The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority would stand to lose “a minimum of $500,000 annually,” said RTA spokewsperson Mary Shaffer in an email.

There also are questions about how such a law would be enforced and by whom? Would it include children traveling with siblings or parents?

“Are we to ask where the child is going, and then refuse to transport them if their destination is school?” asked Shaffer.

Opponents of the provision have won over Senate Education Finance Subcommittee Chairman Randy Gardner.

“Unless I learn there’s a compelling reason to prohibit public transportation for school children, then I will be supporting an amendment to remove this provision from the bill. I don’t speak for the entire Senate, but I think not providing this flexibility for local school districts, this historic flexibility to utilize public transit, doesn’t seem to be the best way to go.”

Jason Whalen, legislative aide for House Finance Committee Chairman Ron Amstutz, said the provision “arose out of discussion” in the house budget caucus about “concern for young children on public transportation, especially children who are traveling alone.”

Any changes made by the Senate would be open for discussion in a conference committee where differences are hammered out.

Said Gardner: “ I want to give it a full hearing. But clearly the burden of proof is on those who would want to end this.”

New law will ban protesters from riding mass transit in California

Posted on May 22, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

RT |

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) customers sit on a train at the Embarcadero station in San Francisco, California (AFP Photo / Justin Sullivan)

Risking arrest isn’t the only obstacle for Northern California protesters — under a new rule about to go into effect, political demonstrators could lose their right to ride public transportation.

Starting next week, law enforcement officers policing the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland and other cities can issue bus and subway bans for unruly passengers — and according to one local news report, that power could be used to prevent political protesters from getting to demonstrations or essentially going anywhere.

Under the recently passed State Assembly Bill 716, BART can issue “prohibition” orders to any passenger cited or arrested for certain offenses, essentially blacklisting some people from boarding public transit vehicles if they’ve been charged with certain crimes.

BART Board President Tom Radulovich told Bay City News the law is “an important safety initiative to keep our employees and riders safe,” adding, “We’re very concerned that for the past few years folks have been assaulting our station agents.”

“We are really wanting to send the message that if you are going to come onto our system and be unruly or violent, there are going to be consequences,” BART spokesperson Alicia Trost told local ABC affiliate KGNO News.

But while the new bill will provide BART police the authority to immediately revoke riding privileges for persons arrested or convicted of acts involving violence, threats of violence, lewd or lascivious behavior or possession or sale of drugs on area transit, those charged with minor infractions could be targeted too. “AB 716 won’t only target violent behavior,” KGNO reported. “It can be applied to protestors who have been arrested during free-speech movements.”

The law will allow for prohibition orders to be issued on-the-spot if a person is just once arrested or convicted for a misdemeanor or felony involving lewd, violent or drug-related acts in a BART zone, but passengers cited three or more times for minor infractions in just as many months are subject to the ban as well.

Under the bill, a transit district may issue a prohibition order to any person charged with violating a number of local statutes, including Section 640 of state Penal Code — the law that goes after riders accused of “Willfully disturbing others on or in a system facility or vehicle by engaging in boisterous or unruly behavior” and those “Willfully blocking the free movement of another person in a system facility or vehicle.”

Although the official statute includes a note from the state declaring that Section 640 “shall not be interpreted to affect any lawful activities permitted or First Amendment rights protected under the laws of this state or applicable federal law,” allowing BART officers to ban users even accused by law enforcement of a misdemeanor could disenfranchise a huge percentage of their rider base and has critics already warning of potential authoritarian overreach.

“Certain instances have happened over the years that have caused some tragic things to happen, but you got to be careful who your profile,” BART passenger Kadmiel McCrory told KGNO.

Indeed, one doesn’t have to look too deep to divulge instances of arguable overreach in not just the Bay Area but on the BART system as well. On the morning of January 1, 2009, BART Officer Johannes Mehserle fatally shot an unarmed, 22-year-old passenger, Oscar Grant, on an Oakland train platform. The killing of Grant remains a highly contested issue among Bay Area residents, and has spawned a number of large protests impacting the BART system, including a November 2010 demonstration that led to 152 arrests. Then in July 2011, BART police shot and killed another passenger — a mentally ill homeless man name Charles Blair Hill — who is alleged to have thrown a knife at an officer. The response that occurred as a result can easily be considered a precursor to enacting AB 716.

Following the 2011 shooting death of Hill, BART passengers orchestrated a massive protest that made national headlines thanks in part to the involvement of Internet hacktivist group Anonymous. A rally for Hill days after his death began peacefully but ended in violence and at least three dozen arrests. When a second protest was planned the following month, BART officials responded by having cell phone service shut down in four separate train stations to prevent demonstrators from coordinating their actions.

“We’re going to take steps to make sure our customers are safe,” BART spokesman Jim Allison said in a statement that August. “The interruption of cell phone service was done Thursday to prevent what could have been a dangerous situation. It’s one of the tactics we have at our disposal. We may use it; we may not. And I’m not sure we would necessarily let anyone know in advance either way.”

Although that protest never materialized as planned, Anonymous responded by leaking the names, passwords and other identifying information for more than 2,000 customers of a BART-affiliated website, announcing in a statement, “we will not tolerate censorship.”

“Anonymous demands that this activity revolving around censorship cease and desist and we know you are already planning to do this again,” the hacktivists wrote. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and American Civil Liberties Union opposed the decision to throttle cell service as well.

Now with AB 716 going into effect, protesters may once again find they are unwelcome to ride on the fifth-busiest heavy rail rapid transit system within the United States. Accumulating only three easy-to-obtain infractions in just 90 days can cause a prohibition order to be issues, and when the law goes into effect on Monday, BART officers will actually be provided with the names and photographs of prohibited individuals in order to keep them from riding mass transit, BART police Chief Kenton Rainey told the San Francisco Appeal. According to Rainey, officers’ computers will contain information about active orders, and any persons picked up or cited on the BART system for new crimes can be matched against the database to see their status.

Rainey added that BART officers will go through training to work with special-needs riders, including the homeless and mentally ill. Even if one of those passengers is cited with a prohibition order, though, it might take a lengthy appeal process to have their ban rescinded. Prohibition orders restrict passengers from riding for anywhere from 30 days up to one year. {…}

Millennials are no driving force as mileage in U.S. ebbs for eighth year

Posted on May 22, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Phil Gregory | News Works

A report by the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group finds more Americans are leaving the driving to others, according to a report from the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group.

For the eighth year, the number of miles driven in the U.S. has dipped.

The biggest decline is among 16- to 34-year-olds who want to live in urban and walkable neighborhoods and are more open to using public transit, said Jen Kim, NJPIRG state director.

She expects that trend to continue and have an impact on government priorities for transportation infrastructure.

“We don’t need to spend as much on things like roads and highways and should instead switch to things like bike lanes, more public transportation options, buses, trains,” she said.

The trend will also contribute to ebbing gasoline consumption and a falloff in the gas tax New Jersey relies on to fund transportation projects, Kim said.

That means other sources of revenue will be needed to meet future transit needs.

Janna Chernetz of the New Jersey Advocate for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign agrees with that assessment.

The state will need to shift away from road widening projects and invest in other modes of transportation, she said.

“We need to see more of a focus on bicycle and pedestrian accommodations. We also need to be investing more in public transit,” Chernetz said. “New Jersey has been seeing record ridership over the past few years, and the money needs to be placed in transit to keep up with this growing demand.” {…}

Convention highlights latest technology in bus public transportation

Posted on May 21, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Michael Henrich | Fox59

INDIANAPOLIS — Hoosiers are getting a taste of what their commute could look like in the near future, as the American Public Transit Association holds its Bus and Paratransit Conference in the Circle City.

The convention showcases the latest technology in bus public transportation.

Fox 59 News took at look at one all-electric bus, which uses new technology to charge itself while pausing at bus tops. The company, Proterra, and its founder claim that it can run all day long and hardly makes a sound, when compared to traditional diesel-fueled buses.

“I call the bus ‘Casper,’ because standing on the street curb you just see this white cloud go by and you don’t hear anything,” said founder Dale Hill.

IndyGo representatives are attending the conference and are in the process of upgrading its bus fleet.

IndyGo President and CEO Michael Terry spoke with Fox59 News as well, saying how he would like to see all-electric buses and compressed natural gas buses used in Indianapolis, in the long run.

Terry would also like to see the regional transit system, which failed to make it out of the General Assembly in 2013, to be passed.

“For a new regional governance, for a new local form of funding and to allow for a referendum: those were the three things in the bill,” Terry said. “It’s an economic generator. It’s about getting people to jobs, getting people to education, getting people to health care. It’s part of our economic fabric.”

Despite the recent legislative set-backs, IndyGo is continuing to expand.

Terry said the public transit system received an additional $6 million from the City-County Council this year. IndyGo is also adding a new route, the 86th Street crosstown route. {…}

A Mesmerizing Timelapse Shows Just How Essential Public Transit Is to Zurich

Posted on May 21, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Kaid Benfield | Atlantic Cities

A Mesmerizing Timelapse Shows Just How Essential Public Transit Is to Zurich

I don’t think filmmaker Alessandro Della Bella intended to make a video about transit in Zurich, but trains, trams, streetcars and the people who ride them are the clear stars in this hyper-fun time-lapse video.

Frenetic Zurich is one of three videos so far in a larger work. Says Della Bella about the project as a whole:

‘Helvetia by Night’ is a time-lapse project about Switzerland by night. Short videos of long nights present you the stunning beauty of the Swiss Alps and show you the magic of a spectacular nighttime sky. Imagine watching a slide-show at fast speed or looking at a flip book. It is photography turning into a movie. Everything in the videos is real and happening out there while most of us are sleeping.

You won’t see the Alps in this one, but you will definitely see urbanism in action. Enjoy:

{…}

Public transit bus converted into mobile lab for students

Posted on May 20, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

| KTVB

MERIDIAN –Treasure Valley schools have a new mobile resource to help children learn science, technology and engineering.

The J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation and Discover Technology unveiled the bus, known as “Treasure Valley 1″ on Monday morning in Meridian.

What was once a public transit bus is now the newest tool in Discover’s fleet of STEM Mobile Discovery Labs.

It features 22 workstations and room for instructors.

“Our goal is to take student by student, put them in an experience where it’s just a spark that happens for them that I can build a robot, I can do C programming, I can do this,” said Cindy Esposito, Discover Technology.

Discover plans to take “Treasure Valley 1″ to schools across the valley over the next three days, starting Tuesday. {…}

Wi-Fi on public transport faces access, monetization road bumps

Posted on May 20, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Ellyne Phneah | ZDNet

More Asian markets are looking to introduce Wi-Fi on their transport systems given that it would improve commuter satisfaction and boost overall GDP growth. Service providers would have to contend with providing Wi-Fi access through areas with poor signals and whether to charge for the service, which would impact uptake of such services.

Naveen Misra, telecommunications principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan Asia-Pacific, said more countries here are starting to offer Wi-Fi services on public trains and buses to provide entertainment for commuters on long-haul trips and improve customer service, as well as boost the country’s GDP growth by enhancing mobile workers’ productivity.

Strong growth in mobile device adoption and rapidly developing IT infrastructure in the region will mean that more Asian cities will start offering similar Wi-Fi access, Misra added.

Already, China and Japan are two markets which have initiated such Wi-Fi projects. The Chinese government in 2012 partnered China Mobile to introduce a pilot project to providing wireless network access on public buses in Beijing.

Tokyo Metro in April this year also introduced a free Wi-Fi service trial at 30 of its train stations.Commuters are able to enjoy the free Wi-Fi service once they download and register for the company’s mobile app.

When quizzed, the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT) told ZDNet Asia that it too is working with local authorities to explore the feasibility of providing Wi-Fi on its train and buses services.

“In tandem with the growth in ridership, we also see a corresponding increase in demand by passengers for more services on the go,” said Jason Chin, information technology director of SMRT.

Access, monetization issues to consider
The growing interest to provide Wi-Fi on public transport may have its benefits, but service providers will know such deployments are not without their challenges, Misra said.

One such challenge is providing wireless access in areas of poor connectivity. The analyst said a train or bus is constantly moving and some of these would go into places with weak to no Wi-Fi signal for a prolonged period of time, particularly in rural areas.

“This scenario is quite likely as many parts of Asia are still not wired up and their IT infrastructure may not be as mature as the U.S. or Europe,” he pointed out.

A possible solution would be to plan the routes with accompanying 3G or 4G network coverage, so users can switch to these options when the Wi-Fi signal is weak, he suggested.

Monetizing the Wi-Fi service is another challenge for service providers looking into deploying Wi-Fi service on public transport, and there are many areas for consideration, Misra said.

For instance, if a transport company decides to make customers pay for Wi-Fi, it has to ensure the connection is strong. It can also offer a hybrid model in which the service is free for a limited period of time, before charging people for their usage, he noted.

Alternatively, if the service provider wants to make the service free, it should consider limiting online activities such as viewing YouTube videos so that bandwidth is more evenly shared among commuters. To decide this, it needs to examine the demographic of its passengers, how developed the country is in terms of smartphone penetration, and what kind of Internet access it wants to offer users, he explained.

“If the appropriate model is not chosen, the transport company may face backlash from consumers on poor customer service and a bad travelling experience,” the analyst said.

Singapore-based commuters who spoke to ZDNet Asia were adamant they would not pay for Wi-Fi on public transport, though.

Student Jasper Tan said he hopes Wi-Fi will be installed as the 3G and 4G signals tend to be “weaker” underground. He did not, however, see the need to pay for Wi-Fi on public transport.

“Singapore already does not charge users for its public Wi-Fi so I don’t see why trains should,” Tan said.

Marketing executive Peggy Lee added Wi-Fi on public transport would be “useful” as her mobile data cap is “rather low” which restricts her usage. “Between paying for better connection or using Wi-Fi free but getting a slower connection, I will pick the latter since I’m rarely on trains and buses for more than an hour,” she said. {…}

How New Jersey Transit Failed Sandy’s Test

Posted on May 19, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Kate Hinds and Andrea Bernstein | Transportation Nation

On the weekend before Sandy thundered into New Jersey, transit officials studied a map showing bright green and orange blocks. On the map, the area where most New Jersey Transit trains were being stored showed up as orange – or dry. So keeping the trains in its centrally-located Meadows Maintenance Complex and the nearby Hoboken yards seemed prudent.

And it might have been a good plan. Except the numbers New Jersey Transit used to create the map were wrong.

If officials had entered the right numbers, they would have predicted what actually happened: a storm surge that engulfed hundreds of rail cars, some of them brand new, costing over $120 million in damage and thrusting the system’s passengers into months of frustrating delays.

But the fate of NJ Transit’s trains – over a quarter of the agency’s fleet - didn’t just hang on one set of wrong inputs. It followed years of missed warnings, failures to plan, and lack of coordination under Governor Chris Christie, who has expressed ambivalence about preparing for climate change while repeatedly warning New Jerseyans not to underestimate the dangers of severe storms.

Official response to this blunder has largely stuck to one script: No one could have predicted the severity of the storm, and the yards had never flooded before. But NJ Transit’s miscalculations came even as New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority dived into climate change adaptation preparations. The agency on the east side of the Hudson developed detailed operational plans for extreme weather events, including moving electrical signals from flood-prone subway tunnels – a step that enabled the system to get up and running much faster than predicted. And though the MTA also suffered catastrophic damage during Sandy, only 19 of its 8,000 rail cars were inundated.

A months-long investigation by WNYC/New Jersey Public Radio and The Recordexamined hundreds of pages of internal NJ Transit and MTA documents and hours of testimony, and entailed interviews with transit, weather and climate change experts. That review found a stark contrast in the way the two agencies prepared for — and responded to — climate-change-related weather events, with sharply different results.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo spoke to his transit chief, Joe Lhota (who has since left the agency to run for mayor of New York), beginning on the Thursday before the storm and “regularly” in the lead-up to the storm, according to an aide. The two men even met accidentally by the mouth of the Battery Tunnel as Sandy was peaking.

“The MTA bounced back faster than any other governmental entity,” Lhota boastedthree months after Sandy in a speech to a New York City business group. Then he noted –- pointedly — that it had taken NJ Transit three months to get up and running again.

The weekend before Sandy rolled in, Gov. Christie and NJ Transit executive director Jim Weinstein did not speak, and the Governor was not involved in the decision to store the trains in a flood zone.

“If I’m making the decisions at that level of specificity, then I’d be under water myself,” Christie told New Jersey Public Radio. Instead, he spoke with his transportation commissioner, James Simpson.

According to emails obtained through the Open Public Records Act, Simpson, who is Weinstein’s boss, had only cursory communications with Weinstein. A spokesman for Simpson said he didn’t have information about the number of times the commissioner communicated with the Governor in the days leading up to the storm.

NJ Transit officials have repeatedly defended the agency’s decision to park the trains in low-lying yards in Hoboken and the Meadowlands.

The Hudson River outside NJ Transit’s Hoboken Terminal/accarino via flickr

“The comparison of the MTA and NJ Transit is akin to comparing apples and oranges,” said John Durso Jr., a spokesman for NJ Transit. “They are two very different public transit agencies – different in scope, different in operations, and different in challenges.”

The MTA is the largest transit agency in the country, and carries seven times the riders of NJ Transit. But NJ Transit is the largest statewide transit agency in the country.

Back in December, Weinstein was called before a State Assembly hearing to explain NJ Transit’s storm preparations.

“I can tell you decisions on where to keep our locomotives were sound, based on all the information we had at the time we had to make that decision, which was midday Sunday,” James Weinstein told the committee. “The facts are the weather models we evaluated at the time had an 80 to 90 percent chance the rail yards would stay dry. Our decisions were informed by the fact that neither of those rail yards had ever flooded. It is entirely wrong to characterize them as flood-prone.”

But that reading has brought derision from weather and climate change experts.

“It just shows they don’t understand A) the hazard and B) the risk,” says Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory scientist Klaus Jacob, one of the nation’s premier experts on transit planning for climate change. “The past, particularly when it comes to climate change, is not the guide for the future.” {…}

What Public Transit Data Teaches Us About How People Use a City

Posted on May 19, 2013 by TODnews — No Comments ↓

Emily Badger | The Atlantic Cities

What Public Transit Data Teaches Us About How People Use a City

We’ve highlighted a couple of projects this week developed out of an Urban Data Design Challenge in April that invited designers and developers to visualize data on public transit in three cities, San Francisco, Geneva and Zurich. The other two projects overlay transit data on a picture of a city’s poverty, or animate a playful take on the life of individual bus lines (and the people who ride them) from one day in October. This last project, from Schema Design, looks instead at the patterns we make in whole city-wide communities of commuters.

As the creators, Christian Marc Schmidt and Sergei Larionov, wrote about the three below videos that pulse with the movement of transit ridership:

Ridership is an identifier for how cities are utilized—whether they are centralized, decentralized or have multiple focal points, whether activity concentrates during rush hour as people are entering or leaving the city center(s), or whether activity is spread out over time. As the transit passenger data suggests, Geneva is centralized while Zurich appears to have multiple centers, and activity is concentrated during rush hours. Activity in San Francisco on the other hand is more evenly spread out, both spatially and over the course of the day. These insights are not only useful for city planners and transit authorities, who can get a sense of what areas see high and low ridership and understand what areas are underserved by public transit.

Transit Patterns: San Francisco from Schema Design on Vimeo.

Transit Patterns: Zurich from Schema Design on Vimeo.

Transit Patterns: Geneva from Schema Design on Vimeo. {…}