ERIK EMERY HANBERG: MAGIC BUS >>>
When you want to talk about technology and the environment â€" especially as it relates to the future â€" at some point you have to talk about transportation.
That means talking about cars and talking about transit. Let’s start with the cars.
For 16 consecutive months, Americans have driven less than they did the previous year. It started because of rising gas prices, but then the global-financial-panic-recession-meltdown-crash-thingy (GFPRMCT) happened, and that drove miles down further. The trend doesn’t seem to be changing, either, prompting Nate Silver to wonder â€"with the help of some statistical charts â€" whether we have ended our “car culture.â€
Sixteen consecutive months of less driving and you’ll start to notice. I have a friend who commutes from Seattle to Tacoma every day. He told me that when the crash hit and its effects started to be felt in companies and jobs losses, traffic got better. Not even just a little better, a lot better. Since October I-5 has cleared enough that my commute saves at least twenty-five minutes each way.
Some of those people aren’t on the road because they’re unemployed. But many others have opted for transit. Sound Transit ridership had record highs in every quarter last year, increasing over the previous year in double digits. Perhaps it’s because of how much we’re using commuter rail, buses, and the Link â€" more than 12 million rides in 2008 â€" that in the middle of the GFPRMCT, we still passed Sound Transit 2 by a healthy margin.
To me, what’s interesting about transit technology is not just the actual technology that created the transit â€" the wheels, the engine, the tracks, etc. It’s also how technology is being used to create a better service for the customer.
Pierce Transit is installing Automatic Vehicle Locators into their fleet of buses â€" think OnStar, but for buses. Drivers will be able to signal the central dispatch for emergencies and their GPS locators will identify exactly where they are.
The next phase of this program is what Scott Morris, a spokesperson for Pierce Transit, calls Next Bus Technology. The goal, he says, is to allow customers to locate exactly where their bus is before it arrives. “The technology’s there,†he told me. It’s natural to bridge it to customer applications. What if I could text or Twitter and find out where my bus is? Or just call it up on my phone and see if it was running behind schedule?
Unfortunately, Pierce Transit has not yet partnered with Google to offer routes and times in Google Maps. The transit feature is an incredible service, especially when on the go with a mobile phone.
I was recently in San Francisco and standing at the airport trying to figure out how to get to my hotel. I plugged in the name of my hotel into my phone and then asked for directions from my current location. It gave me a driving route, but also offered me the information I needed to take transit. It displayed station info, route times, fares for the BART and the cable car, and where I needed to go to get there. I followed it stop by stop and ended up a block away from the hotel.
Morris told me he would love for Pierce Transit to be able to offer that service, though they haven’t gotten there yet due to concerns about schedule changes (if Pierce Transit has to implement an emergency schedule due to snow, Google wouldn’t know).
Still, as the technology becomes better integrated into our phones and computers and the guessing game is gone, riding buses will become that much easier and the amount of time we spend behind the wheel will keep decreasing.
LINK: Hazardous Business archive
ABOUT HAZARDOUS BUSINESS: Erik Emery Hanberg's
Hazardous Business column - which looks at the business of technology
and the environment in Tacoma and the South Sound, and how it will
shape our future- appears every other Tuesday here on Spew.
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