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By viv, 20 September, 2011 8:00 am

Since the last update, GeoVation Challenge winners,  mySociety, have launched FixMyTransport a site for public transport users to report problems and they are already having loads of visits and issues reported.  Myf Nixon, from mySociety, explains:

Last time we updated, FixMyTransport had launched, quietly and unobtrusively: we didn’t want to make a song and dance about it until we were certain that it was running smoothly.

On August 30th, we announced our presence to the world: mentions in national and international newspapers, on the radio, in specialist press and across the blogosphere soon meant that word spread: on that day, we had over 10,000 visitors (and were very relieved to see that our server load testing had paid off).

Since then, we’ve been really pleased at how the site has been taken up: over 700 issues have been reported; knowledgeable users are weighing in with good advice for others; and we’re beginning to forge relationships with some of the transport operators who have been quick to see FixMyTransport’s potential for their customer relations departments.

This week we saw the first of our campaigns to gather over 100 supporters. It’s been interesting to watch patterns emerge, too: the issues that seem to most concern our users to date are access (to stations for those with limited mobility or children in tow); fare prices; over-crowding and delays.

But there have been maverick reports too: one person requesting fewer seats on commuter trains (much outnumbered by reports that ask for more seats, it has to be said) and another wondering whether a slide might ease passenger congestion at Canada Water.

From the developer perspective, it’s been an intensive period of bug fixes, functionality enhancements, and user support. We’re logging of all the many suggestions that come to us via the ‘feedback’ button; our users seem particularly clued up on how they’d like the site to work better for them, which is great.

It’s been really gratifying to find that the vast majority of the feedback is warm and welcoming, even when the user has experienced a problem – in fact, FixMyTransport is already starting to feel like a community. There have been quite a few enquiries from people in other countries wondering if they can replicate the site – our answer is of course, yes; as with all mySociety projects, FixMyTransport is built on open source code and we are delighted to see others use it and contribute their own improvements or variations.

GeoVation funding was specifically for the mobile version of FixMyTransport, always a priority for a site that’s about travel. It was clear that for launch, even though an app would not be ready at that stage, we would need modified version of the website to support mobile user, and we put a lot of effort into making the mobile experience as good as possible.

We’re now seeing this as a preferred route to our finished mobile product: this approach removes the extra step for the user of actually downloading anything- it should be quick and easy just to visit the site on a browser. It also allows us to target multiple devices, and means that as features are introduced to the main site, they are also immediately accessible on mobile.

During the last month, we have been working on features specifically to help mobile users: integrating geolocation, and finding faster ways for users to report the most common problems on phones without too many keystrokes.

Although there are still many improvements on our list, FixMyTransport now works well on the phone models our visitors most frequently use, and we’re working on extending support and adding features that will make reporting issues from a mobile quick and easy. We’re getting there!

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By viv, 16 September, 2011 8:00 am

Back in June we told you how GeoVation Challenge winner, AccessAdvisr, were putting the foundations in place to enable delivery of a proof of concept product.  Below, Neil Taylor tells us more about what they’ve been doing since.

Since the last AccessAdvisr blog we have been busily rounding up data sources for our proof of concept trial in Nottingham.  Every data holder we have engaged with so far has been overwhelmingly positive and forthcoming in their support for AccessAdvisr, which has been fantastic.  It is clear there is a genuine desire to see this concept work, and for our part we are itching to get our beta version up and running in Nottingham so that we can start the process of establishing and engaging with a local user community.

Having gathered up most of the data sources and web-services we need to populate our accessible map base, the next step was to track down a software developer.  We spoke to a few local firms, but are delighted to welcome Realistic Digital on board.  Based in Leicester they are just down the road from our base in Nottingham, which has already enabled us to hit the ground running.  At the time of writing we are in the midst of finalising the specification for the proof of concept version of AccessAdvisr, having kicked things off with an intensive design workshop at the beginning of September.  The software build and web-design activities are pencilled in for the next month, so if all goes well we should conducting our first round of user testing in late autumn/early winter.

If you can’t wait and want to learn more about AccessAdvisr, then please contact Neil Taylor at ITP on 0115 9886903, or email: taylor@itpworld.net.  AccessAdvisr is also now on Facebook, so you can ‘like’ us in order to follow all of the latest project developments.

Neil Taylor

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By viv, 14 September, 2011 8:00 am

Have you heard about liftshare week?  It’s being organised by liftshare, one the winners of our ‘How can we improve transport in Britain?’ GeoVation Challenge. Find out more about it and also what’s happening with myPTP below:

The countdown is now on to liftshare Week 2011 (3^rd – 7^th October 2011). liftshare Week is the UK-wide event which aims to encourage more people to discover the benefits of car-sharing.  Awareness of car-sharing is at its height during liftshare week and more people than ever are registering to share their journeys, so there is no better time to give it a try.    This year we’re incentivising individuals to give car-sharing a try, by reminding them that drivers in the 1980’s will only have been paying 37 pence per litre for petrol!!  The only way you can get yourself such a great price on petrol these days is by splitting your petrol costs with other people.  Share your commute with just one other person, and you will be leaving your car at home 2 weeks out of every four – typically saving yourself about £800 a year.  A persuasive argument we hope you’ll agree!  Individuals can register for free at www.liftshare.com and why not tell your friends and family members too?  The more car-sharers we’ve got, the better chance everyone’s got of finding their ideal matches.

For Businesses and Communities who have their own car-share schemes, there is no better time to do some promotion and capitalise on the heightened awareness. We’re expecting more car-sharers to join in this year than ever before, so taking part will do wonders for your travel plan targets.   Organisations already working with liftshare should already be well under way with their preparation and lots of promotional materials have already been made available.  If  you don’t have your own car-share scheme you can take a look at http://www.liftshare.com/business/liftshareweek.asp#chap3 where you can downloads lots of freebies to get your staff car-sharing.  Alternatively visit www.liftshare.com/business or give us a call on 01953 451166 to find out how you can get involved.

In other news…… myPTP is also in full swing and our developers have been working hard.  We’ve been talking to lots of organisations to ensure we’ve got a spot-on understanding of what their Travel Survey requirements are, which has proved really useful in helping us to hone our ideas into an exciting new tool.  More on this to come…

Louise Boom

liftshare

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By viv, 13 September, 2011 8:00 am

Interest in the London Cycle Map Campaign, one of our GeoVation Challenge winners,  is growing;   Ben Irvine tells us more, below.   Have you signed the petition to support it yet?

I’m delighted to say that 1,000 people have now signed the London Cycle Map Campaign petition which is being run by Cycle Lifestyle magazine .

Fittingly, the 1,000th signature was accompanied by a comment which really says it all:
“Love this idea, great for tourists and locals.”

Public interest in the London Cycle Map Campaign is intensifying as the 2012 London Olympics approaches. With millions of visitors and hundreds of millions of viewers around the world rolling up for the ‘greenest Olympics ever’, the capital is calling out for a better system of cycle routes and mapping.

In step with this mood, political interest in the idea of unifying and improving London’s cycling infrastructure has been growing too. In 2010 Labour Baroness Oona King was championing the idea of a ‘Tube map’ for cyclists, and more recently Green Party mayoral candidate Jenny Jones has promised ‘a safe cycling network for the whole of London, not just blue paint and hire bikes in zone 1’.

The London Cycle Map Campaign is calling on politicians and cycling campaigners alike to ensure that the London Cycle Map idea becomes a stated electoral issue in the run up to both the 2012 mayoral elections and subsequent Olympics.

We believe Simon Parker’s ‘compass colour’ mapping system is genuinely groundbreaking and would offer an economy of navigation unparalleled by proposed or existing cycle networks anywhere in the world. His map is also – importantly – beautiful, iconic and inspiring, and would really send a statement to cyclists and non-cyclists in London and the world over.

Let’s make it happen. Here’s to the next 1,000 signatures…

Ben Irvine
Cycle Lifestyle Editor and London Cycle Map Campaign

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By viv, 22 August, 2011 8:00 am

In May, CycleStreets won £27 000 in the ‘How can we improve transport in Britain?’ GeoVation Challenge which was funded by Ideas in Transit and Ordnance Survey.

The funding is to help them build a new toolkit for groups across the country to campaign for better cycling facilities.  Now they’re looking for a name for it!

They want the name to reflect the theme of a central place where UK cycle users can submit problems they encounter on the streets.

Can you help suggest a catchy name? To find out more about what they’re looking for and ideas they’ve had so far visit their blog.

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By viv, 19 August, 2011 8:00 am

Mission:Explore, one of our GeoVation Challenge winners, have been busy planning missions to encourage children and families to use the National Cycle Network and lots of other exciting stuff too.  Below, Daniel from Mission:Explore tells us more about it.

Things are moving along quickly here at Mission:Explore and we are very excited about the coming year. Winning the support of GeoVation, Ideas in Transit and the University of West England means a brand new Mission:Explore website with lots of beautiful and new functionality.

We won GeoVation funding to improve transport in Britain and specifically the National Cycle Network. Working closely with Sustrans and Arla we are creating challenges and activities that we call ‘missions’ along parts of the cycle network. When people discover these missions (online or through stickers in the landscape) they will be able to win points and earn badges. We will be experimenting to see how this kind of ‘gamification’ can create new uses and users of this important piece of infrastructure. We are very pleased to have Charles Musselwhite, a social psychologist from the University of West England, researching our work and helping us to make this project a success.

Unlike the current Mission:Explore, on the new platform users will have accounts, explorer blogs, leader boards and many other enhanced features.
Mission:Explore will be relaunched as www.MissionExplore.Net this September. We are delighted that National Geographic Education are using the platform to encourage another kind of behaviour change. The US based organisation are using MissionExplore.Net as their central campaigning tool for Geography Awareness Week . The site will be launching with 20 missions (take a look here ) which encourage children, teachers and families to explore their local communities and earn online Mapping, Storytelling, Photography and Take Action! badges. Taking place in November Geography Awareness Week aims to draw attention to the importance of ’geo-literacy, ensuring that people make well reasoned decisions about our nation’s economic competitiveness, national security, environmental sustainability, and the livability of our communities in the 21st century’. We are recently back from the National Conference for Geographic Education in Portland (Oregon) where we trained Geography Awareness Week coordinators in making the best use of Mission:Explore.

Moving forward we will be announcing a new pricing plan in which third sector organisations can create and manage their own ‘channel’ and missions on MissionExplore.Net from just £25 for 1 mission. They can also purchase a ‘white label’ version of the platform for their own use. Any charity or public sector organisation that places an order before the launch of MissionExplore.Net in September will enjoy a 15% discount on any selected plan.

For further details contact Daniel at daniel@thegeographycollective.co.uk.

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By viv, 10 August, 2011 8:00 am

CycleStreets, one of our  ‘How can we improve transport in Britain? GeoVation Challenge winners, were awarded £27 000 to help them built their cycling advocacy toolkit for groups across the country to campaign for better cycling facilities.

A lot of their users will already know that they use  OpenStreetMap data as the basis of their street/path network for route planning, but did you know that they are using several of the OS OpenData™ datasets in their Journey Planner?

OS OpenData offers a wide range of datasets from Ordnance Survey. CycleStreets are using the postcode database, Code-Point Open®, Boundary-Line™ and OS Street View® to improve the facilities on Cyclestreets.

Find out more about how they are using it on their blog.

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By viv, 5 August, 2011 9:26 am

mySociety, one of our  ‘How can we improve transport in Britain?’ GeoVation Challenge winners, have been working on their new website. Below you can find out more about how it’s being developed.

In the months since winning our share of the GeoVation award, the FixMyTransport website has quietly gone live. I say ‘quietly’ because we chose to launch in private beta until we are absolutely certain that every part of this complex website works as it should.

It’s been absolutely fascinating watching the first public transport reports come in, gather supporters, and spread via the power of social media. That is, of course, just what head developer Louise Crow built the site to do, but there are always unknown quantities once software meets actual living, breathing users. Louise is currently being kept exceptionally busy responding to user feedback and implementing suggestions for improvement.

The GeoVation award was, of course, to allow us to add a mobile component to FixMyTransport, and this has mainly fallen to a second of our developers, Dave Whiteland. Thus far, he is deep in the research phase that is vital to any decent application.

This has involved speaking to specialists in the mobile field, a process Dave describes as “useful, especially in the (few) places where they didn’t quite agree”.

The next step was to build a very simple mock-up, focusing on allowing the user to report a problem with as little typing as possible, and with easy-to-press big buttons that Dave hopes will make the report-making process a lot easier when on a bumpy bus or crowded train. This skeleton implementation has already been useful, throwing up some complexities that are better fixed now than way down the line.

A crucial part of the app will be its geolocation component: again, it’s important to get this exactly right if we want people to report problems on the go. Producing a map with a “you are here” marker on it isn’t enough – FixMyTransport aims to do better than that, by proposing not just the nearest station (if you’re on the train), but perhaps also the station(s) you’re most likely to have just come from. We have to think, “passengers are mobile, so what would help most?”

Dave’s also been looking at which parts of the FixMyTransport website are most immediately useful when accessing it via a mobile device – browsing behaviours differ from on a desktop. Therefore it’s likely that the mobile app will signpost different routes through the content.

In all, it’s proving to be an interesting job for the mySociety developers, taking them deeper into areas such as jQuery mobile and responsive web design – and hopefully kitting them out with tools they’ll be able to use in future projects, too.

Myf Nixon
mySociety

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By viv, 30 June, 2011 8:00 am

Wondering what our ‘How can we improve transport in Britain? GeoVation Challenge winners have been up to since May?  Neil Taylor from Integrated Transport Planning tells us more about what has been happening with AccessAdvisr over the last month:

Since learning that AccessAdvisr had received funding through the GeoVation competition we have been putting the foundations in place to enable our delivery of a proof of concept product in Nottingham over the next 6 months.  This chiefly involved pulling together a tightly focused expenditure and deliverable plan so that both we, and our sponsors, have a common understanding of what we are delivering in return for the funding.

We have spent a lot of time talking to interesting contacts at Nottingham City Council, Loughborough and Nottingham Universities, the RNIB and local mobility impairment groups.  The result is a fantastic series of offers of help and support for the proof of concept product we will be developing.  Our recent chat with RNIB’s innovation team has given us the confidence that we can make AccessAdvisr as visually accessible as possible for people with sight and reading impairments – clearly an important feature for a website and smartphone app that intends to improve the quality and richness of information about accessible transport networks.  Our growing network of contacts here in Nottingham (and elsewhere in the UK) means we are already looking forward to engaging with potential service users through a live trial of AccessAdvisr later in the autumn.

We have also spent a good portion of time in month 1 re-analysing some of our own previous user-needs research.  Blowing the dust off focus group and depth-interview reports produced over the last 10 years has given us the opportunity to revisit what people have previously told us about barriers that prevent them from getting around.  We will be combining this information with practical research undertaken through major research projects such as AuntSue to define the types of information that would make independent travel easier, and exploring how AccessAdvisr can address some of these issues.

Over the course of the next month we will be developing the technical and functional specification for AccessAdvisr.  We will also be appointing an app developer (we are in the process of finding out where they hang out, what they eat/drink, etc!) to work as part of our team to help us bring the proof of concept version of AccessAdvisr to life.  We’ll keep you posted on how things go through the GeoVation Blog.

Neil Taylor (left) and Jon Parker (right) of ITP receive the award

In the meantime if you want to learn more about AccessAdvisr, then please contact Neil Taylor at ITP on 0115 9886903, or email: taylor@itpworld.netNeil Taylor, Integrated Transport Planning Ltd.

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By viv, 21 June, 2011 8:30 am

Simon Parker of London Cycle Map Campaign is one of our ‘How can we improve transport in Britain?’ GeoVation Challenge winners. Below he shares his thoughts on why we need transport alternatives to the car to keep our cities moving:

If you were to look at maps of London as often and for as long as I do, you might find that your imagination wanders on occasion. In my case, I have created a little fantasy. By an as yet undetermined means, I travel back in time to the period just before the railways were developed. Then, with a carte blanche in front of me, I set about recreating London, imagining how the metropolitan area might look with the benefit of hindsight. If only we knew then what we know now!

Anyone who saw these maps would fairly conclude that I am not anti-car. But, like many people––including, I might add, a former CEO of Volvo: ‘Private cars are not a suitable mode of transport in town’––I recognise that large numbers of petrol-driven vehicles driving about the place diminishes the quality of city life. Thus it is that I spend many a fanciful hour considering how to mitigate the car’s less attractive features.

If we were able somehow to start afresh, it is almost impossible to believe that the capital would look much the same as it does now. Don’t get me wrong. I love the randomness of London’s road network, and personally I wouldn’t change that aspect even if I could. But if, as I say, we had ourselves another chance, then surely more emphasis would be placed on alternatives to the car the second time around, including, of course, the bicycle.

It might surprise those of you unfamiliar with the history of the bike to learn that in 1949, 37% of all journeys in London were made by bike (20% nation-wide). The main reason that this enviable position changed was that the bicycle came to be regarded as a poor man’s form of transport. People were looking to move on from the austerity of the post-war years, and with the increasing availability of mass-produced cars, four wheels became more desirable than two.

The car, of course, is more than just about getting from A to B; it’s about status as well. But even though we cannot turn back the clock, we can still wind it up from time to time. Let me conclude with some choice words from Andrew Marr in his programme on Megacities:

If we’re all going to live in the megacity––and it rather looks like most of us will––are we all condemned to a future of choking jams and sweat-packed tube trains? No, I think that maybe, we don’t want to turn our backs on our low-tech past. Maybe Dakha and its half-a-million cycle rickshaws does have something to teach us. Across the globe, and London is gearing up for a three-speed revolution.

To get real change in the city, you need two things: you need pent-up demand on the streets, and you need proper leadership. When the two come together, change can happen very, very fast. A good example would be the London bicycle [hire] scheme. When this got going, a lot of people said, ‘Well, it’s not going to work.’ And within the first ten weeks there were a million journeys made.

There’s no single magic bullet that’s going to solve the megacity transport crisis. We have to snaffle ideas from all over the place, taking smaller, smarter solutions which, when you take them together, can have an impact. London’s first large-scale public bike hire scheme is part of that potential mix.

In the economy of the great cities, they’re always learning and copying and stealing from each other. And it’s not from just the high-tech cities, so Dakha in Bangladesh may be a nightmare, but it’s a nightmare run on pedal-power, and that’s something that modern cities are re-learning. And so to have a transport system that really works, you need everything. You need the taxis, and the cars, and the buses. You need the trains. And you need bicycles, and of course, decent places to be able to walk safely as well. It’s a bit like fusion food, you know, that we eat all the time. You bring in all sorts of lessons, all sorts of flavours, and you mix them up, and with a bit of luck and leadership, you get a city that’s moving again.’

Simon Parker

See Simon’s London Cycle Map