Thanks!

Andy

The reason why county projects “suck” is because of the processes they are legally bound to. After figuring out what they want, they have to issue a RFP, wait for the bids to come in, wade through them, pick one, develop it, and then test it. It’s a long process. Even if they started today, it might be 3-4 years by the time it’s done, and would be technologically obsolete by then. The private sector doesn’t have this problem because they don’t have to be “fair”.

Perhaps the proper thing to do is rather than using outside vendors and a rather cumbersome RFQ/RFP/bid process is to bring development of strategic applications in-house. Most companies do most of the core work for their web applications internally because it is the only way to deliver high-quality that meets the company needs quickly. Even in the private sector using an external vendor slows things way down and you are more likely to end up with something you can live with rather than what you really wanted.

Another thought would be to treat anything “bleeding edge” as research and fund people at the UW to work on it.

I’d be interested in what other US transit agencies are doing along these lines, since most of them are operating under similar constraints to Metro.

- Right now Metro doesn’t publish it themselves
- If you want it, grab it from UW ITS. It’s an old project, but it still works beautifully. It’s also what powers One Bus Away
- It sounded like Metro wanted to publish AVL data once the OBS project is complete. The project isn’t done yet, and they’re working with the vendor on how to publish the information. The vendor has a solution that works with their product, but one of the goals of this meeting was to find out what developers wanted out of the project.
- Don’t expect data from Metro until the OBS project is complete. 2010 at the earliest, 2011 is more likely.

A couple of other points:
The reason why county projects “suck” is because of the processes they are legally bound to. After figuring out what they want, they have to issue a RFP, wait for the bids to come in, wade through them, pick one, develop it, and then test it. It’s a long process. Even if they started today, it might be 3-4 years by the time it’s done, and would be technologically obsolete by then. The private sector doesn’t have this problem because they don’t have to be “fair”.

I didn’t talk to Brian Ferris much as I have a pretty good idea of what he’s up to so I’m not sure how much he was pushing it, but anyone that wants to get started right now should look into the One Bus Away API. Augmenting this with the GTFS data can get you started NOW. Brian has also done a lot of the difficult legwork–the REST API can even give you an encoded poly line for a given route for those wishing to work with mapping.

I recorded the audio, I just need to edit it down a bit. Will post the link here.