MetroRiderLA

While Metro awarded Miss Traffic her tiara and t-shirt, San Bernardino County’s largest transit operator, Omnitrans, announced the winners of its D.I.Y. TV Student TV Commercial Contest earlier this month. The contest, which had local high school students competing to create a commercial promoting Omnitrans, had significantly higher stakes than Metro’s Miss Traffic. A grand prize package of $1,000 cash, a new laptop computer, a year of free bus rides, and the honor of having the winning commercial played on local television and in local movie theaters surely motivated these Inland Empire kids to come up with creative ways to promote something most teenagers might dread, riding the bus.

The online votes were tallied and the grand prize went to Trevor Stevens of Redland High School for his spot, “Save Gas Use A Pass“. The commercial pits transit user against car driver in a turtle-and-the-hare race, where the bus rider comes out victorious because high gas prices and an empty wallet stop the car driver in his tracks. Trevor, who according to the Inland Empire newspaper The Sun has plans to embark in a career in TV and film production, chose to focus on the money savings that come from riding public transit because “the biggest issue for students right now is the price of gas”.

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Two days ago I said, We want our Google Transit!

I wasn’t alone. The consensus from the 20+ comments the post received was that MetroRiders are ready for a better trip planner. What’s more, the post caught the eye of some blog-savvy Metro employees, who in defense of their employer, let fly with some very good news.

Google Transit is on its way to LA!

Metro bus data is ready to go, and Metro rail data is in the process of being added as I type. Once Metro compiles all the information, hopefully by this summer, Angelenos will have to option to “Take Public Transit” every time they search for directions on Google Maps. Why summer at the earliest, and not right now? Setting up a transit feed with Google Transit is a time consuming process that requires a lot of unglamorous grunt work, and inputing rail data is even more taxing. But what matters is that it’s been confirmed and is coming soon.

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Today was supposed to be the day that Pam from Santa Monica was to hold her monthly Live Chat via Metro Interactive. I had planned to hold what I dubbed “The Anti-Pam Chat” (not that we have anything against Pam per se, she did a bang up job on public access television) to coincide with Metro’s oft maligned experiment in interactive communication. The idea was to provide a live chat forum where we could sarcastically discuss and make fun of the Metro Chat, MST3K style, while presenting Pam with our own questions and awaiting the usual canned responses. Unfortunately, the Metro Interactive Chat for April has been canceled. Apparently Metro is testing out a newly redesigned chat tool and it’s not ready for prime time yet. On one hand it’s great that they’ve decided to try a new chat program, since the one they’ve been using was interactive only in the very broadest of definition of the word, but on the other hand it means The Anti-Pam Chat kind of loses its purpose.

Regardless, I’ve decided to go for it anyway, so today at 12:30pm MetroRiderLA will hold its first last-minute impromptu live Anti-Pam chat over at the MetroRiderLA Forum. There’s a little chatbox on the left-hand sidebar which is where the live chat will take place, and we’ll discuss whatever the hell comes to mind. Forum topics, recent blog posts, transit news, MetroRiderLA, Pam’s haircut, whatever. Plan your lunch break around it, we’ll try to talk for half an hour or so. If it works out, then The Anti-Pam Chat will return in May, hopefully along with Pam, for some interactive Metro fun.

See ya there!

Last month, Siel over at the Emerald City blog wrote about the Google Transit Earth Day Challenge first proposed by the folks over at World Changing. The idea of the challenge was to get transit agencies to get their systems onto Google Transit by Earth Day 2008, which is on April 22nd. With 8 days to go and no word from Metro, it’s unlikely that LA will be on Google Transit any time soon, but let’s look at what Google Transit could do for us.

By now everyone is aware of the ubiquitous Google Maps and its fantastically innovative way of providing driving directions, simply input a start and end location and Google calculates the best route with turn by turn directions, time estimates, and of course a corresponding map. It’s likely that Google Maps made the once neccessary Thomas Guide a bit irrelevant since its release. Unfortunately, for those without cars, the directions provided by Google Maps are for the most part useless, and transit users have had to rely on proprietary programs created by the cash-strapped transit agencies to get transit directions. These programs, like our own Metro Advanced Trip Planner, tend to be clunky, unattractive, and often teeter along the fine line of usable and unusable. And when compared to most modern web applications, especially the ones created by Google, the agencies programs just can’t compete.

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Image courtesy of PhotoDu.de.

According to Permanent Campaigns, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is investing $24 million to expand a pilot program that provides real-time bus tracking data to its customers via web and digital signage at certain bus stops. The program, called the CTA Bus Tracker, has provided real-time date for one bus line (the #20 Madison route) since 2006. The expansion will make real-time data for all 154 CTA bus routes available on the Bus Tracker by spring of next year. Starting next week, 13 bus routes will be added, with the rest coming incrementally.

I loaded up the Bus Tracker to check out the interface and it’s very nice - bold and simple, with no fluff. Metro has implemented a similar interface, for non-real-time bus tracking called NexTrip Beta, and the CTA Bus Tracker, aside from actually being real-time, blows it out of the water in terms of interface design. The CTA interface is still a pop-up, which sucks, but it removes one superfluous element that Metro’s interface has… the need to input your destination stop. The CTA Tracker has 3 inputs: choose your route, the direction of that route, and the bus stop you will be starting at. The CTA Bus Tracker instantly updates with an easy to read list of the routes, bus numbers, and estimated arrival times. The interface is far more responsive than Metro’s NexTrip, which seems to have a unnecessarily long load periods after a selection is made. The CTA Bus Tracker also has a map option, which shows your bus stop on a map and the locations of the buses on your chosen route, updated in real time! It’s really cool to see the buses move along the map toward your location.

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Metro continues to move into Web 2.0 with this new video posted on Metro’s very own YouTube Channel.