In the world of public transit, data is a valuable thing. And historically, it's been the purview of public transit agencies. They're the folks who know where the buses are, and they use their own, often archaic systems---paper schedules mounted on bus shelters, for example---to dole out select info to the public.
In recent years, that dynamic has changed. Cities, states, and countries are embracing the idea of open data, turning all their information over to any company, group, or citizen interested in doing something productive with it. In an era where smartphones are nearly as common as people with hands, government is now the platform, not the product.
When's your bus actually going to show up? How do you get from the dog park to that new music venue? Want to share your route with friends in real time? Apps with answers abound.
Still, all those data sets, provided by a plethora of public agencies, have been fragmented. If you wanted to know how your transit agency stacks up with the one across the river, or how well served your part of town is compared to your coworkers', you were signing up for a lot of work. That's now changed, thanks to a new tool appropriately called "AllTransit."
The impressively comprehensive online tool was released this week by the nonprofit research institutes Center for Neighborhood Technology and TransitCenter. The result of a year spent compiling data from 805 agencies, 543,787 stop locations, and 15,070 routes across the country, the tool provides an unprecedented look into nationwide transit access and equity.
AllTransit promises to assess the quality of transit in your neighborhood---or your congressional district, or your city, or your region, or your state. Plugging any of these into the tool and you get an "AllTransit Performance Score" on a ten-point scale. The score rewards places where transit connects lots of households to lots of jobs, where buses and trains come frequently, and where high shares of commuters use transit to get to work.
That's just the beginning: You can use AllTransit's many, many tabs to evaluate local transit by health, economy, mobility, or equity measures, like how many residents live within a half mile of transit, or whether bike share connects to existing bus routes and rail lines. Oh, and if you're a fan of dope maps: AllTransit provides dope maps galore.
"This is useful for assessing the needs in a particular place, for equity work," says Ratna Amin, transportation policy director at SPUR, a Bay Area urban policy research and advocacy organization. "That’s the current conversation, and we have a tool here to inform that," Amin says.
Nearly every major American city now has an open data policy, as do a growing number of smaller locales. It's a great way to generate useful applications without dipping into precious government funds. The best part about these outside applications is that they (usually) make the government in question look great---and its services more functional, too. A recent survey conducted by the Transit Cooperative Research Program found 66 percent of responding agencies believe open data policies improve the perception of their transparency; 78 percent think more of the public is aware of their services.
With the help of open data, Albuquerque, New Mexico, was able to reassign workers---whose jobs had just entailed fielding calls from confused bus riders---to more useful tasks. Los Angeles created an app that helps users choose the best mobility option for their commute, including light rail, buses and bike share. Boston incorporates metrics from nearly every part of city government to create a real-time "CityScore", which makes it easy for citizens to keep tabs on how well officials are doing their jobs.
Open data policies also happen to open transit agencies up to outside criticism. If data is going to be helpful, it should point out "where transit is underperforming, and diagnose why." Amin says. Sometimes,__ __"lines that appear to be well-served aren’t [being] used at the rate you would expect."
Which is exactly where AllTransit comes in. Let's go to a city with good (but not perfect) transit. Denver, Colorado gets an AllTransit Performance Score of 7.8, indicating a pretty high frequency transit system that gets a good number of people to work every day. (7.4 percent of Denver commuters use transit, compared to 5 percent of the overall US population---okay!)
AllTransit tells you that within half a mile of Denver's various public transit stations, you'll find 447,735 jobs and 620,088 people. The city's municipal population is just above 680,000, so it looks like the transit system is serving nearly all its residents.
But dig a little deeper, and you see Denver's transit benefits aren't equally extended to everyone. Only 19.7 percent of city residents live near high-frequency transit---that is, transit that comes often enough to be truly useful. "Frequency is one of the key determinants of whether [residents] are going to take transit, and also the degree to which they’re going to rely on it," says Linda Young, the Center for Neighborhood Technology's director of research. In other words, infrequent transit isn't worth much.
And the benefits of transit mostly accrue to the well-educated folks in the Mile High: 29.2 percent of residents with a bachelor's or advanced degree live near high-frequency transit, compared to 10.6 percent of residents without a high school diploma. If transit is a public good, it shouldn't ignore underserved populations.
Just like that, local transit officials, advocates, journalists, and researchers are armed with localized stats they can use to weaponize their arguments. AllTransit may not fix problems, but it can help pinpoint them.
Naturally, the tool isn't perfect. It only has data on major agencies in regions with more than 100,000 people. And it's definitely for the data-savvy. Though the satisfying "Performance Score" may lure amateur transit enthusiasts into plugging in their addresses, their work addresses, and their mom's addresses ("Ha, I live at a 6.8---you're stuck in a 3.4"), the density of these data and graphics means AllTransit is most useful for those willing to spend a bit more time understanding it.
And, as with many datasets of this size, there are errors, if minute ones. (Some commenters over at StreetsBlog are already complaining that the tool miscounts the number of farmers markets in their area.) Marc Ebuña, a co-founder of the policy-driven Boston advocacy group TransitMatters, says it would be great if the tool were integrated into an application that allowed planners to see how the data changes as they make theoretical shifts to routes and schedules.
But AllTransit, like the concept of open data itself, will evolve---plans for a 2.0 are already in the works. "These tools become useful the more that people keep investing in them," says Amin. In the meantime, the transit-inclined have a lot of problems to diagnose. Then they just have to figure out the cures.
