GreenCityStreets

I’m making a presentation on GreenCityStreets at the Stadtgespräch: Innovationen für die Stadtentwicklung in Vienna on Tuesday May 15. The conference will be held from 9:00 until 12:00 at the Bahnorama (Favoritenstraße 51, 1100 Wien), the visitor center for the new Vienna Main Train station. Should be an interesting conference with presentations from 12 different innovative projects dealing with city planning. More details are available at the ZIT website.

My main work last week was developing a video for the Vienna Content Award. Every year Vienna awards prizes for “content” oriented products (films, games, art, consumer goods, etc.) developed in the city. It’s a neat idea designed to showcase designers and products made in Vienna. Naturally the video is a music video parody … I’ll share the link when it’s finished.

This week I make a presentation at the International Institute for Information Design IIID Traffic & Transport 2011 conference in Vienna. The theme is “Traffic, Transport and Social Media” and I will discuss results of the greencitystreets.com project so far. I’ll be posting the slides from my talk later this week.

There was a very nice article (in German) about the project in DerStandard (Austrian newspaper) last week in their Research Special. The article: “The Public Transport User as Transport Planner” explained perfectly the idea that we want to provide users with the tools to really help plan improvements to public transport, rather than only identify problems like broken elevators etc. (which is also extremely important!).

Cool Links – I discovered the following cool links this past week:

FixMyTransport – Great new site developed by MySociety group in Great Britain. Does exactly what we would like our social network (Forum) to do, but with a beautiful user interface. (If we take GreenCityStreets further than a prototype we hope to change the Forum to use FixMyTransport or SeeClickFix as the social network interface. Right now our prototype is simply designed to show the possibilities.)

Here’s a great article by Tom Steinberg (MySociety) in O’Reilly Radar on How to create sustainable open data projects with purpose. In it he talks about developing the FixMyTransport project.

City of Leduc Master Plan – From the SeeClickFix blog, the city of Leduc (Canada) is using SeeClickFix to help develop their transport master plan. It’s a very similar idea to GreenCityStreets, but looks like without our educational component.

Rescape your street – describes a really neat application developed by Andy Likuski who worked at the wonderful OpenPlans organization this summer on his Rescape software. According to the openplans blog:

Rescape adds tools to Google Sketchup that makes it easier to do neighborhood redesigns with an emphasis on carfree or car-light streets and comprehensive transit, in three dimensions.

This is exactly the type of tool we want to add to GreenCityStreets to help urban residents develop better ideas and communicate those ideas to city decision-makers. How many good ideas have languished because real people could not draw a simple sketch of the design?

Finally, a really thoughtful article by Kevin Kelly on the future of social networks (Why the impossible happens more often). He talks about the fact that twenty years ago no one would have believed what social networks are doing today (think wikipedia) … so we can expect really big things in the future. This resonated with me because sometimes I think people think I am crazy to believe that real people, urban residents, can become really involved in planning their city (rather then simply providing “input”) … but Kelly’s article reinforced my belief.

The first draft of Using the BusMeister Public Transport Game in the Classroom is now available. We welcome your comments!

BusMeister Level 9 - Initial settings screenshot.

I’ve been working on developing a guidebook for teachers on how to use the GreenCityStreets BusMeister game in the classroom. The illustration above shows how I have been annotating some of the screenshots to explain what’s going on in the game.

The project’s been lots of fun because I needed to play the game again and then write about what each of the levels means … with a focus on how what happens in the game reflects “real life” public transport operations. I was even able to better my score.

I’ll post a link when the teacher guide is finished, in the meantime I would be interested in comments from readers on specific things I should include in the guide.

After playing again, I am even more convinced that the game is really good and can help people learn about public transport. The problem is that it’s a little hard to get started playing the game, the user interface is not so good and it takes time to understand all the functions. I completed an intermediate evaluation of the whole project as part of a paper submission to the US Transportation Research Board 2012 Annual Meeting, you can view the draft paper here: GreenCityStreets.com – An internet application for increasing public involvement in public transportation.

We are working on making some small improvements to the game and making the GreenCityStreets website more complete. Hope to have the relaunch next week.

citysandbox Home Page

Here’s an interesting site I learned about from GovLoop today: citysandbox.com. It has similar functions to the GreenCityStreets.com Forum pages and is designed to help citizens ask questions about city issues and post information. From their FAQs:

CitySandbox is a project of the Social App Lab at CITRIS that aims to be a tool for community members to identify, publicize, and resolve local issues. Members are encouraged to ask questions, join discussions, implement events and to vote on ongoing issues. In this way, CitySandbox hopes to provide an easy and fun way for communities to form collective opinions and actions.

The Social App Lab at CITRIS, at my Alma Mater UC Berkeley, is working on lots of interesting designs for games and using new technologies in cities. Their courses look fascinating, wish I could go back to school!

Great article on eaves.ca about open data for government. David Eaves makes the point that the internal processes for working together within the organization are critical for making open data work. After describing one of the success stories from Washington DC’s program he says:

In short, the deep problem that needed to solved wasn’t open data. Its was an information management. Getting the information management and governance policies right was essential for DC to move quickly.

Full article: It’s the icing, not the cake: key lesson on open data for governments

The ideas of frequent rider programs for public transport operators is intriguing. Jarrett Walker at humantransit.org has a great article today on the subject. (Jarrett quotes the Atlantic article by Alexis Madrigal about Stanford professor Balaji Prabhakar).

Jarrett’s point is that a frequent rider program is probably an overly complicated approach for helping shift demand from peak to off-peak service. I think he’s right.

Airline loyalty programs were started because trips on different airlines are essentially the same. The idea was to create a relationship so customers became committed to one airline through earning miles, status, upgrades. Since there is a huge qualitative difference between different types of urban transport (driving, biking, public transport, etc.), loyalty programs probably make less sense in this context.

But, perhaps loyalty programs could be used by public transport operators to create and support better relationships with their customers, not because these customers will ride more, but rather to increase the political effectiveness of public transport agencies in the public arena. Public transport needs committed advocates to support complex and controversial government policy (e.g. to build an exclusive bus lane).

Creating and supporting public transport advocates is the goal of GreenCityStreets. Our concept is to educate people about public transport using the BusMeister game and best practices library, and then to provide people with a forum for discussing ideas to improve their local public transport systems. These technology tools are available in the GreenCityStreets prototype application.

Now what we need is an agency or organization that will incorporate the GreenCityStreets tools into a supportive environment (i.e. an agency who will use the application to pro-actively listen and respond to customers – much as companies like Zappos do).

And, yes, creating that supportive environment probably means creating some type of rewards program …

Your thoughts welcome!

Rot-Grun Stau Vienna political poster about transportation

This political poster illustrates why projects like GreenCityStreets are needed to help educate residents about sustainable transport and to provide them with a forum for suggesting and supporting good ideas. Why is this necessary?

Because transportation is complicated and politicians try to make it seem simple.

This illustration from Vienna is from the middle-right political party (Austrian Peoples Party – OVP). In Vienna the Social Democrats (red) and Green Party (green) are in charge of the government administration. The OVP is criticizing the city’s transportation policy by saying that the “Red-Green = Stalled Traffic”. They suggest that “A coordinated regional transportation policy would be better.”

But, what on earth does that mean? Where are the specifics? And, why is Vienna recognized worldwide for its high quality public transport system and livability if transportation is such a problem?

The answer, of course, is that urban transportation is complicated. There are no simple solutions and many good ideas cannot be implemented because of simplistic political slogans like the one in this poster. Instead of being constructive the OVP is simply seeking to make points by criticizing a problem that all interesting cities share: congestion.

Our idea with GreenCityStreets is to educate city residents and empower them to help support implementation of politically difficult transportation solutions in their cities … the opposite of simplistic sloganeering.

By the way, I don’t mean to pick on the Vienna OVP, all political parties are guilty of the same thing.

BusMeister: Adding an improvement to the street.

Just finished developing the latest version of instructions for playing BusMeister. Feel free to add comments if you need more information or anything is unclear.

Social networking is a fundamental part of the GreenCityStreets concept. Here’s a good summer reading list from UC Berkeley … UC Berkeley Social Networking Reading List.