

Transitmix (YC W15) Cuts the Paper Out of Bus Route Planning - hinting
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/18/transitmix/

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erjiang
Very interesting and encouraging to see a public transit service in YC.

Article says that you all don't have prior experience in transit. Are you
learning from your early adopters as you go?

How much and how often do agencies re-plan their routes?

How much of planning is driven by politics vs driven by data?

What positions you all vs the consultancies who do planning? Would you expect
consultants to be your customers or competitors?

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mc32
>How much of planning is driven by politics vs driven by data?

I recall living in Seattle around the time the light rail route was being
planned. It seemed to be about 80% political. And so you meander through
everywhere before you get to a useful destination. Like transit systems which
stop short of an airport.... Or take the circuitous route to the airport...

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throwaway88594
Two of the best air-rail connections are Narita and Schiphol.

The transitions are so seamless that you can disembark and accidently end up
on the train platform without even trying.

Two of the worst are in the USA: Honolulu and SFO.

Honolulu has the ideal topology for a light rail (straight line from airport
to Waikiki), but won't build a light rail to the airport because then all of
the taxi drivers would become unemployable.

SFO is breathtakingly bad. Just try transferring the first time from Caltrain
=> BART San Bruno => BART SFO on a cold weekday to really appreciate how awful
it is. I just tell people to take a taxi from Millbrae.

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rburhum
I have met the Transitmix team while I was at Code for America and all I have
to say is that these guys are just plain ol' _awesome_. If you have not seen
their demos yet, search them in YouTube. Amazing stuff.

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hinting
Hi, founder here. Throw any questions you have my way.

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Sanddancer
I know you're just getting started with a lot of this, but how much planning
are you doing with counterintitive transit issues, like bus holdovers at major
transit centers? There are a lot of frustrations of busses scheduled to drop
off or pick up passengers at stations, but with no layover to do both duties.
This naturally leads to rather grumpy transit riders. Is your application
going to be set up to handle situations like that?

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hinting
Those are called pulse points. There's some great background here:
[http://www.humantransit.org/2010/12/basics-finding-your-
puls...](http://www.humantransit.org/2010/12/basics-finding-your-pulse.html)

Today, planners use some scary excel sheets to try to figure this out. They
are scary enough that most don't.

Definitely on our list of things to tackle.

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Sanddancer
Interesting article, and I can just imagine the scariness of figuring out the
pulse points of the various Bay Area transit hubs and agencies (aside: can we
please get like half of the agencies to just go ahead and merge already,
interagency transfers are the worst) using tools like massive excel sheets and
the like. Anyways, best of luck in incorporating all this info.

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rajacombinator
Pretty cool! I imagine something like this would be especially useful in
rapidly developing countries.

