"In a world where political systems are increasingly gridlocked every day, and much of Silicon Valley is focused on peddling ads, the civic innovation and open data movements are a bright and optimistic exception to the zeitgeist."
Amen to this! I'm excited by the trend of more hackers realizing that they have the skills to fix a lot of what is broken about politics and government.
This idea has a lot more potential. Once you have the data, you can obviously give the individual user the best alternative route if there is delay on the desired one. You can also use this proactively, similar to what "Google Now" does, to alert commuters in the morning how much longer their trip might take. You could even offer functionality to automatically adjust the phone's alarm clock.
But you can take this even further than individual users and dynamically re-route passenger flows if enough of them are using the service. Say there is an interruption on a main commuter route, but several alternatives exist. Most people are now likely to choose the second best route. Since that route is unlikely to be able to handle the additional passengers, it will probably be jammed very quickly. However, using the RT passenger and situation data, it would be possible to find the globally optimal solution for load balancing the passenger flow. You can then provide the passengers via smartphone with individualised information regarding which route to take to implement this routing.
I think this has a lot of potential for taking public transport to the next level by utilising existing capacities to the fullest extent and providing benefits to all passengers.
Yeah, this was the intention. As cliche as "X for Y" has become these days, I can see why it's such a popular format. Most people instantly get what MBTA Ninja is, based on a four word tagline.
There may be reception, but is it possible to get a GPS fix? Without one, it may be hard to make automated assumptions about congestion / travel speed.
I am not sure the authors have ever been to Boston. Here there is only Inbound and Outbound. I went to www.mbta.ninja and then spent about 30 seconds trying to figure out if any of the alerts are related to me.
I actually commute on the T every day. As _august pointed out, inbound/outbound switches at Park St, so it's not the best way to identify alerts going a single direction throughout the line.
We are definitely trying to make the line selection easier to use, so if you have ideas it would be great if you could make a Github issue!
The four stations where the directions change are the square made up of Park Street, State Street, DTX, and Government Center (or Haymarket since Gov Center is down? Not sure, haven't been to Haymarket in at least two years).
Directionality (for new folks) or terminus (for more seasoned riders) are infinitely better than Inbound/Outbound.
That's not true. I've gotten better, more detailed feedback from other companies. Things like: your approach for this coding challenge was X when you should have been doing Y.
Amen to this! I'm excited by the trend of more hackers realizing that they have the skills to fix a lot of what is broken about politics and government.