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.
Google has added Boston’s MBTA to its Google Maps GIS service, as of this morning. The new integration means Bostonians can map point-to-point routes and compare travel times by car, on foot, or by public transit – as on this map of the route from Mass High Tech’s newsroom downtown to MBTA headquarters in the Theatre District. Twitter user @j_b_f was first to notice the development, late this morning.
The MBTA this afternoon invited news media to a joint announcement tomorrow at 11 a.m. at South Station with city transportation officials and Google Cambridge’s engineering director, Steve Vinter. No details of the planned announcement were released, but the website Universal Hub reports officials will announce the new tool at the presser. A Google spokesman said the company is “evaluating data,” but has no information to release. MBTA officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
According to a report on the website Greater Greater Washington earlier this month, Boston and Washington DC were the only two major U.S. transit systems remaining without integration with Google Maps. Since 2006, the T has offered a wayfinding solution on its own website that provides much of the same functionality as the new Google integration.
The T and general manager Daniel Grabauskas are overdue for some good news this week, after three of the agency’s boardmembers wrote letters to state transportation secretary James Aloisi saying they have no confidence in Grabauskas’ leadership. The letters cited a damning NTSB report, out earlier this month, on a Green Line trolley crash that killed an operator in 2008.
On Monday night, a disembodied, digital female voice announcing the station stops on the Worcester line of the Commuter Rail led to a human conductor with exquisite comic timing cracking up the herds being carted away from their paymasters.
The system had a couple of small glitches — it arguably mispronounces Worcester (”Wooooooster”) and definitely mispronounces Natick (”Nattick”) — which led to the first spontaneous, group laughter I’ve ever heard on the commuter rail. Delay-induced groaning tends to be the only synchronized noisemaking on the Commuter Rail.
On Tuesday, we were back to human announcements, so the automated announcements may have been a test — I’ve emailed a T spokesman, but haven’t heard back yet.
As if MBTA drivers didn’t have enough to worryabout, now MIT researcher Yoel Fink has developed a sheet of fiber with light sensors built in, making a flexible camera.
Fink tells Technology Review the fabric could have applications in defense and in making large, flexible telescopes, though it hasn’t all been worked out yet.
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