Good Stuff in Transportation

It’s easy to be cynical in this day and age, so we’ve put together a transcript of our May 2010 transportation forum to restore your faith.

In it, we get to hear from three transportation innovators doing great work with limited resources. I urge you to give it a read.

We hear from Jon Davis from the MBTA who explains how their Open Data Initiative has spawned a number of privately-developed applications. The MBTA’s strategic approach is a subtle, but crucially important one — rather than decide what their customers want, then slog through an in-house software and hardware procurement and development process — the T cleaned up their data and made it available to private developers. The result? A bunch of software apps developed at no cost to the Commonwealth and available to consumers. Take a look a what’s available and give it a try — for example, if you are sitting at your computer right now, go try “Track the T” and never wait more than a few minutes for the T again.

The transcript also details how the MTA (the San Francisco-area transportation management entity) determined that the implementation of technology was more cost-effective than pricey capacity expansion. Learn what they did and how they did it.

Lastly, we learn how the North Texas Tollway Authority used technology to build relationships with customers and monitor customer service levels.

See? There is some good news out there.