For whatever reason, the MBTA Orange Line doesn’t extend to the Boston neighborhood of Roslindale, where I lived for two years.
To get to the subway at Forest Hills, you have to take a bus. And that means waiting for unpredictable amounts of time.
Actually, I could usually predict the amount of time pretty well: a long time. Lack of an easy way to get to the subway is part of what made moving to Jamaica Plain attractive for me.
But if the MBTA and Google are right, residents of Roslindale and the thousands of others who use the bus system should have a much easier time of things starting today (as long as they have web access).
That’s because Google has made Boston one of the first four U.S. cities to get live online updates for when the bus is going to arrive. You can get the updates by accessing Google maps on your desktop or mobile device (Google’s blog post can walk you through how it works.)
Bus riders probably won’t be the only ones to benefit. If it catches on, the tool could also be good for landlords and business owners in neighborhoods like Roslindale — with the technology helping to close their public transit gap with other neighborhoods.
The Globe reports developer/environmental activist John Rosenthal is building the biggest private solar installation across the street from Fenway Park in Kenmore Square.
Twelve hundred solar panels will sit on the rooftops of the $500 million Fenway Center that Rosenthal’s Meredith Management is developing. He’s also starting Here Comes the Sun LLC, a company that will sell electricity to the complex’s occupants: Apartments, offices, retail stores and a garage. Here Comes the Sun will also power the Yawkey Commuter Rail station, which will be renovated from a break in a fence in a parking lot to an actual structure of some kind.
No. 2: “eCommons.” This one also has nothing to do with killing anybody, and is also a college student service web site — Harvard Medical School’s this time. We might have too many college kids around here.
At No. 3: “Gloucester Daily Times,” which I’ll bet shocked even the Gloucester Daily Times. This is the year after the 2008 Time Magazine story about the “pregnancy pact” that either happened or didn’t, and its interminable fallout.
“Restaurant Week” and “BHCC” at Nos. 3 and 4, respectively, seem reasonable enough, with the recession making expensive restaurants less, and community colleges more popular. “UMB.edu” follows at No. 6, which seems a little like calling someone to ask for their phone number.
The trio took the T’s data from August 12, ran it through openFrameworks and Matlab statistical software, and made the images with Adobe Illustrator.
So next time you hear an announcement about a disabled train or signal problems or an unruly passenger, just think about how pretty the delay will look on a poster.
Since our beloved and normally only sporadically dangerous T has decided to be more reliablyandconsistentlyterrifying, and since everybody deciding to drive to work en masse would end life in Greater Boston as we know it, what are your alternatives? Even better, what are your science-fiction-y alternatives that won’t really be available any time soon? MHT Blog is here to help.
Terrafugia's Transition
Let’s start with the outrageously impractical: If you’ve got about $150,000 burning a hole in your pocket — and these days, who doesn’t? — you could buy a flying car. But that would really just amount to driving, since Terrafugia insists its Transition is a “roadable aircraft” — you drive to the airport and fly to LaGuardia, you don’t just take off while stuck in traffic on 128.
Rail-Pod
You absolutely cannot use automated, personal train cars to get to work — but it would be cool if you could. Rail-Pod, started by four UMass Amherst alumni, wants to build feeder lines to the existing fire-and-crash-prone train lines on unused tracks — but even if they accomplish their goals, that’s a ways off. (more…)
Cambridge-based Sparkfish Creative has developed an iPhone app that lets a user browse the T’s scheduling info and find out when your bus or train is coming.
All of these Tscheduleapplications have me wondering — am I the only one who didn’t know the Red, Orange, Green and Blue lines even had a schedule?
The Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation tweets about another MBTA visualization, this time for the Commuter Rail. So far I haven’t seen one dot stop on the track to wait for another dot to push it.
I’d thought about doing this before, but it would have taken screen scraping schedule information off the site. I learned recently through a developer outreach that the Massachusetts Department of Transportation is running that the MBTA had released their schedule information in the Google transit feed specification (GTFS). With the data in hand, I went to work using the ruby-processing wrapper of the excellent Processing graphics toolkit.
Fast Company traces the “edupunk” movement to revolutionize higher education via the Internet to MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative, which launched in 2001.
The magazine also talks to Neeru Paharia, a PhD candidate at Harvard Business School and former director of Creative Commons who co-founded P2P University, and furthers the T’s reputation as wellspring of innovation:
Ultimately what interests Paharia is proving the model, demonstrating that there’s a way to provide education cheaply or even for free to all who are qualified. “I ride the Boston T around and I see these ads for schools, and it bothers me that so much hope is rested on having an education, and yet at the end of the day you end up with $100,000 in debt. What are you paying for? And is this the best way of setting up the system?”
One more T-inspired technology and we’ve got a journalistically certifiable trend on our hands.
The Globe finds the inspiration behind Google Transit to be no different from the inspiration for most things — a ride on the T. Two former locals helped develop the product, which recently rolled out service for the T. One of them had already been mashing T data into Google Maps before he started working at the search giant:
“As a developer in a bedroom in Somerville, the MBTA would not give me the time of day,’’ Hughes said. As a result, he spent hours extracting data from PDFs on the T’s website.
By Kyle Alspach
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