A Community Approach To Transit

Consumers are starting to wrench control from official public transit authorities when it comes to information about the services: when the transit authority just can't get their act together, others will find ways to mashup and present the necessary data.

A recent example of this is MyTTC, which provides information about public transit in Toronto far beyond the dreck that the official Toronto Transit Commission site provides. From the MyTTC home page:

MyTTC was born out of a desire for free, open access to transit data. The amount and quality of the data currently available from the TTC is somewhat lacking, with fewer than twenty percent of the stops and stop-times available. We hope, with your help, to change that for the better.

We are not the TTC, nor are we affiliated, endorsed, or otherwise associated with them. This is a community effort to make using the TTC a better experience for everyone. We hope you’ll join us!

This effort came out of TransitCamp, an unconference about public transit first held in Toronto, where two guys put their heads together and came up with an idea for a better way to access transit information, then took on the project of actually doing it in their spare time. This was not an undertaking for the faint of heart: the TTC is North America's 3rd most used transit system (after NYC and Mexico City), carrying 1.5 million passengers a day on 150 surface routes and 3 subway lines. Route information and timetables are not available in standard formats, and some is not available electronically at all.

Arguably, the TTC should be providing this information on their own site: there are many examples of great public transit sites that have route mapping and lots of other information; we just don't have one of them in Toronto. And you can be sure that no official transit site would make a time lapse video, complete with music, of vehicle departures:

TTC Weekday Service (small) from Kieran Huggins on Vimeo.

Comments

[Todd Sieling]

Folks in Toronto have been doing a lot of good things to lead the TTC to where its customers are, rather than where its marketing department feels it should be 'positioned', so it's good to see the recognition here. One minor correction - the system moves 1.5 million passengers a day, not per year. Canada's not *that* sparse :)

[Sandy Kemsley]

Todd, thanks for pointing out the error -- I fixed it in the post.