Here is a link to the show Sue Nilon and I did on April 19th. Here is a link (scroll down to April 19) - but listen to the other guests as well!
If you don't want to hear the entire show - here are highlights from the conversation:
Florida House will have stuff up and running soon. The web site will be www.theFLhouse.org
We talked about civic apps that would make it easier to find - and comment on - decisions before local Boards. Right now, the system is so complex it favors a handful of people who know the system. I described a dream app-
The dream app would let you see weekly what is going on. You could customize so only actions within 5 miles or so from your house would show up, or by interest areas like budget or parks. The dream app would have the hearing date, deadlines, a short summary of issues, and comment fields for reading others' comments and providing your own.
This app would also include fun stuff (e.g., classes, events) and stuff to know (Holiday Hours, household hazardous waste collection). Emergency information would also be pushed. The mockup below is rough, but shows how a drop down menu could show - on a map- what's going on - in this one pretend street cleaning.
There is an app called YouTown that looks like it is getting closer.
We also talked about tech usage - not everyone has tech. But the statistics show trends:
Over half the adult population has a smartphone, 87% have a cell phone, 20% own tablets and another 19% own e-books like Kindles.
22% of Americans do not have access to the internet (that's 1 in 5 - so still a big gap). BUT - of the primary factors of why a non-internet user is not on internet – 31% of non-internet users say they have no interest or motivation – only 10% said money was a factor. Only 4% said it was because of age.
Sites like Virgin Mobileare bringing dow the cost of mobile internet - www.virginmobileusa.com
Sarasota Apps - Sarasota actually has a digital presence
SCATTRAC– SCAT has placed GPS enabled transponders on buses, so a new web site lets a rider see where their bus is and an estimated wait time.
Twitter - Sarasota has a good Twitter presence: @SCgovconnections, @cityofsarasota, @visitsarasota, @scgovlibrary
Emergency Response - Emergency Services helped form the first civic apps since emergency response tends to trump old school inertia on adopting new things – @scgovEOC
Transit – Look to apps like Embark, which seem suited to users (like tourists) who don’t know the stop, route and destination routine. Features like service alerts, geolocation, and even business purveyors of groceries and beach supplies on a map are what we need.
Planning – Other cities are using apps to collect input, hold design contests, and map assets. The magazine Next American City has its list of top apps for wellness, travel, data, and community brainstorming. There are LOTS of complaints that the workings of the city and county are not connected to a vision. Visioning activities are one of the hottest areas of app development right now. SARA is the first augmented reality app for picturing a building on a site.
Of course any app needs to be coupled with good old fashioned human outreach and talking. The best app of all.
Last year the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council applied for a HUD Regional Sustainable Communities Grant. While the Region was not awarded a grant, one outcome of the process was a better examination of equity and how people consume civic information.
The grant application process coincided with the release of several fascinating studies from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This series of studies is creating a portrait of the growing use of cell phones, smart phones and social networking sites, summarized below. These have huge implications for those of us who work with the community, and pay close attention to make sure everyone (especially kids, the elderly, low income residents/workers) has the same access to important community feeds and feedback loops.
This information also coincided with my own family’s experience with wireless. My Verizon plan will soon be up for renewal. As I groused about the price, my teenager quipped, “Why don’t you use this?” as he waved his Virgin Mobile smartphone. So I looked into it and come March, I too will part of the prepaid cell plan revolution, paying $35 rather than $110 a month for text, talk and data that comes closer to matching how I actually use my smart phone. The Pew studies took on a new meaning, as did my own outdated views on the digital divide.
Getting back to the Pew studies, here are links to the various studies and key tidbits from each:
Cell phone texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and their friends, with cell calls coming in a close second.
Teens from low-income households are much more likely than other teens to go online using a cell phone. 44% of black teens and 35% of Hispaic teens use their cell phones to go online, compared with 21% of white teens.
Low income teens are much less likely to be on family plans. Among teens living in households with incomes below $30,000, only 31% are on a family plan that someone else pays for. In this group, 15% have prepaid plans that someone else pays for, and 12% have prepaid plans that they pay for entirely themselves.
83% of US adults have a cell phone of some kind, and that 42% of them own a smartphone. That translates into 35% of all adults.
25% of smartphone owners say that they mostly go online using their phone. While many of these individuals have other sources of online access at home, roughly one third of these “cell mostly” internet users lack a high-speed home broadband connection.
Android is the most common smartphone platform, followed by iPhone and Blackberry devices
Demographically, Android phones are especially common among young adults and African-Americans, while iPhones and Blackberry devices are most prevalent among college graduates and the financially well-off.
Americans with a household income of less than $30,000 per year primarily own more basic mobile phones (roughly half have basic cell and a quarter own smart phones). However, age and ethnicity are huge factors: among 18-29 year olds earning less than $30,000 per year, 39% own a smartphone. 44% of both Hispanic and African Americans own Smartphones.
Others are writing about the growing use of smartphones, in particular among lower income groups as well. Last August, Lucy Hood wrote in the Wall Street Journal on how minorities are accessing the Internet through cheap, prepaid wireless data plans (here, subscription required).
If indeed, we are looking at pre-paid plans and mobile technology, what would that mean for packaging civic information? A couple of thoughts:
Optimize for Mobile – My son’s homework is posted by his six teachers who use six different clunky platforms which are not optimized for mobile, and barely optimized for desktop. School Board - let’s talk about posting assignments for mobile phones.
Android Civic Apps –Android devices dominate the prepaid phone market, so any civic hackathon better be on Android (in addition to iOS – Apple’s operating system).
Creating Content – Access is great but like public outreach – is passive. Participation via smartphones would yield a lot of meaningful data since way too much public policy is created via reaction to a small number of squeaky wheels. How can we harness smartphones to get a true picture of what is happening in every neighborhood? What are the barriers to reporting and microblogging from people in high crime neighborhoods? Among the elderly?
Prepaid and Computers – As long as we are talking pre-paid and equity, it is worth noting that prepaid vendors are also offering broadband – check out the Virgin Mobile plan for $20 a month. The crashing prices for laptops and netbooks may close further the digital divide.
Tablets and eReaders - Overall, the number of Americans owning at least one e-reader (Kindle, Nook) or tablet (iPad) jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January. In another study, Pew also found that between November 2010 and May 2011, one of the highest adoption rates for e-readers was among Hispanic adults (at 15% total last year). Certainly this has implications for mobile information as more devices come with 3G/4G built in and bring a more computer like experience for roughly $20 a month. It also means there will be hunger for content - so packaging content in book-like form for e-readers will be fertile territory (not to mention the growing number of e-publishing formats).
At this point it is important to highlight work underway by the Federal Communications Commission which sponsors Lifeline and “Connect to Complete” programs to offer phone service, cell phones and high speed broadband to low income and/or unserved communities (e.g., where broadband service is incomplete). While this helps close one aspect of the digital divide, it may be exposing another: those who have mobile web and those who do not. Because the move to mobile web is occurring quickly, this is where the prepaid plans are patching the divide by offering low cost smart phone plans and broadband.
Transit plays such a prominent role in smart growth lexicon, it’s like we’ve created a new grammatical construct: Subject-Verb-Transit. Having lived in the suburbs for five years now, though, it’s become painfully obvious we are speaking in incomplete sentences. What we are really talking about is Subject-Verb-Heavy Transit.
What about the other half, the not-so-heavy transit? Each year, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) publishes the Public Transportation Fact Book. It is chock full of statistics on the various types of transit. For discussion’s sake, here is a summary of several tables’ worth of data to compare by mode.
There are several stories here worth noting as they relate to rubber tire service:
Not just half - bus trips comprise over 50% of total transit trips. Paratransit is a big deal in its own right, and important for both mobility in suburbs and pressure on transit budgets.
APTA includes bus rapid transit in the bus category; there are 30 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems operating around the country. BRT, however needs its own category because there are so many combinations of capital and operating factors that skew bus system data.
There are 90 “heavy” systems (including some not presented the table) which are on fixed guideways. There are 1,088 bus systems. Subtracting out the cities with heavier modes (and considering that some cities have several bus systems), the country has close to 900 cities served only by local bus service. The most comprehensive list of bus systems can be found on the Federal Transit Administration’s website, presented by region for Agency’s 10 regions.
Bus systems are jobs machines. As such, buses have the largest share of national transit operating budgets. While we activists pay a lot of attention to FTA’s budget to make sure New Starts and Small Starts get a nice chunk of the Agency’s $9 billion budget, more than twice that amount is spent annually running bus systems. Why is it we howl over ineffective infrastructure and inadequate maintenance funding but pay no heed to ineffective use of operating budgets? Shouldn’t filling up buses to let people flow be on par with rebuilding pipes to let water flow?
Let’s face it, local bus occupies almost no discussion in the smart growth world. Now, I know what you are thinking: Developers won’t invest in land development near bus stations because they (and the routes) can be moved at any time.
This is crap. First, every time someone wearing a smart growth hat repeats this canard. It just puts off to a future date taking a serious look at how to leverage local bus service for community development. Second, it implies smart growth and building communities is only about development. Finally, recent research questions whether there is such a bias anyway.
The authors of the study, Milena Scherer and Ulrich Weidmann, used cluster analysis to examine bias between rail and bus systems in a city where both systems offer the same quality of service. They note in the abstract,” Where equivalent service qualities were provided, no significant higher effect existed in tram-based clusters compared with bus-based clusters.”
OK, the study is from another country (Switzerland), and I only have access to the one page summary so am not sure what was included in the various “clusters.” Nonetheless, the study speaks to the raison d’etre for BRT – come as close as you can to mimicking rail service with bus service. In the United States, the two focus areas for mimicry have been (1) vehicles with a more rail-like appearance and (2) dedicated right of way. These are also two of the most capital intensive investments. So the big question is what are the low cost factors a community can devote attention to in order to come closer to the performance benefits of rail: reliability, ease of use, speed, and access to a range of destinations?
There are four main areas that seem to be ripe for attention from smart growth and transit activists.
1) Focus on one longstanding & outstanding route for TOD – Yes, stops and routes can change, but most bus systems have longstanding routes and stops at job or trip generators like hospitals and universities. Establishing a focus on one route can signal to the development community you are serious about setting proverbial stakes in the ground.
2) Transfer Stations - Transfer stations offer the most promising real estate for local bus-centric TOD because a rider gets double (or more) coverage of potential places to go. It also signals more permanence since eliminating a transfer has negative impacts on multiple lines. It seems like heavy rail planners have caught onto this value more quickly and strongly than bus system planners.
3) Transportation Technology – Dan Sturges has a great Vimeo video (contained in this post) about installing a variety of new transportation modes in strategic suburban locations. Dan talks a lot about the concept of the station car and bike sharing.
4) Information Technology – This is the big one. Even the best apps, like PDX bus and Google transit are schedule based – not traveler based. Bus systems need to approach the next cohort of future riders as if they are tourists, not commuters. Systems can’t assume that riders know the bus line, the destination’s address, or neighborhood. If I am a tourist, I don’t want a list of sign poles planted at cross streets, I want something that combines the app AroundMe + Next bus technology+ Augmented Reality like Travel Guide with AR to see where the closest stops are + trip planner + instructions on timing + information on getting back to the trip origin. Here in the land of 60 minute headways, this last one is a really big deal. The video below shows the AR technology (and embarrassingly how long this stuff has been out).
My husband had a great idea: use AR to code buses so that as they approach, a rider can hold a device or smartphone up to tell if its the right bus and/or where it goes. Information technology is not just about iPads and apps. A couple of years ago, Portland mailed postcards to residents to see if anyone wanted customized transit information (as in – this stop is closest to your house – let’s spend 10 minutes seeing where you can go). I am still looking for a link.
There are three main activities that could help move this forward this year
1) Long Term Tee Up– The U.S. Department of Transportation is holding meetings on January 26 and 27 on the Integrated Dynamic Transit Operations (IDTO) operational concept, which is Washington-speak for “DOT wants to build apps.”
2) Near Term Hackathon – If I were Ray LaHood, I would go the Michael Bloomberg route and begin building apps now (instead of plodding completely through the IDTO process). Why not convene all the transit, smart growth, GIS techie, mobile marketing, app-building communities and see what you can do now with a three-venue, national hackathon dedicated to local bus service and paratransit? Use IDTO to fill in the gaps or work at the larger scales that only feds can do. In the near, near term (like – you can do this today), encourage local hacking, like this dude’s guerilla public information.
3) Study what Tallahassee Florida just did like Crazy – Tallahassee just revamped their entire system by replacing the centralized transfer structure with more suburb-to-suburb connections. This move was covered somewhat glowingly in the Atlantic Cities and Grist. Both acknowledge kinks, but for the riders’ views, go to the comments. The system change should not be viewed as “good move” versus “bad move,” but a chance to see what happens when routes are reduced and rearranged to adjust to new employment realities -- and the real life blow back on people who depend on buses.
I don’t know if I have convinced you that this is worth paying serious attention to. But at some point, it would be nice to have bus-only suburbs that go to bat for transit and planning, and send people to DC who do that batting.
Monday, April 30, 2012 at 09:23AM 
