Further explanation to follow.

Since last year members of our local Code for America Brigade have been gnawing away at a raw real time bus feed from Hampton Roads Transit with aspirations of improving the way valuable public transportation information is presented; to decision makers, to interested citizens and ultimately to the people who care most about it, bus riders.

As is often true in these circumstances, the good folks who work to make a domain technology better seldom are experts in the domain. This is changing some but the general circumstance is universal and not likely to change much. Technologists shouldn’t have to be domain experts. That doesn’t scale. What that means for this story is that the coders mostly aren’t bus riders.

In the case of public transit, though, it makes a lot of sense to me, personally, that I explore more opportunities for improving information technology for HRT by using HRT. I want to learn how to use the bus. Even 26 years ago I hated learning to driving in Virginia Beach because “sprawl & crawl” is not fun to drive. I want my daughter to learn how to use the bus. There’s a decent chance she’ll be attending school in both VB and Norfolk next year (a distance of about 15 miles). For parent’s who can’t or don’t want to become a taxi the default solution is to buy their kid a car. Hopefully they car pool. There are a lot of reasons why I don’t want this to be the only option.

So, today I took the bus to a local coffee meetup. I wasn’t confident I’d be successful. Riding HRT buses is an expert domain. I’d failed before. The cost of failure is missing things or at least being very late. But not today. Today was a perfect experience so I wanted to share it, share why it matters to me and why it might matter to you.

I started my morning as usual but made sure I had some extra time to  get to my destination about 4 miles away. I wanted to ride my bike and have it with me but I didn’t want to ride it to the meetup. I really don’t know much about the trip except that I want Route 20 and that it’s a time of day when it’s likely to be running frequently.  I use the HRT Buses smartphone app built by our brigade to start my trip.

I’m at home. Bus 2001 is headed my way.

Shoot! I forgot that I need to let the dogs out. Guess I’ll head to the stop and check for the next bus. Maybe I’ll have to bike to the meetup after all.

Looks like I missed bus 2001 but bus 2046 is close. I notice that it’s 11 minutes late but I don’t really care because I can see that it’s close. I’m already at the stop.

Before the bus arrives, I realize I don’t know how to use the bike rack on the front of the bus. While I have a couple of minutes, I decide to look it up on my smartphone. I found it right away and there was a simple diagram to teach me. I was skeptical because most of the necessary information HRT publishes on the web isn’t optimized for web, much less mobile.

Yep! There’s the bus now. (Actually I realize that it’s Route 28. I’m on Route 20, which is about 5 cars behind.) It turned out that the bike rack on the bus had a slightly different locking handle mechanism than the instructions. The friendly driver got out and helped me, adding maybe 15 seconds to the stop. I also didn’t have exact change. That added some time as the driver wanted to ask the other riders if they had change for me. The fare was $3.50 for an all day pass. I had a $5. I said “don’t worry about it.” That took another minute or two.

I’m on the bus. My realtime location is slightly ahead of the realtime report of the bus. Not too bad considering the bus location is delivered through a feed from the bus to HRT central and back out to a public feed about every 30 seconds…and then we have to process it into the app. Sure enough, the bus is now reporting that it’s 13 minutes behind schedule. That’s probably the two minutes I added.

I made it to the meetup on time and was the second person to arrive. (I thought it was interesting to note the different styles of shoes were were all wearing.) Overall it was a pleasant experience. I learned some things about riding the bus and I got my civic tech geek fix.

Now, if this is the first time you’ve read or heard me talk about HRT Buses and/or you know a thing or two about bus riding and transit apps you’ll realize there are a some circumstances specific to this scenario. I’m not going to get into all that here. Hopefully it suffices to say that we understand the nuances, too, and are always striving to improve our apps and make them more accessible to more people on more devices.

If this sort of thing interests you then you should join our local Code for America Brigade by attending one of our weekly meetups that alternate between Norfolk and Virginia Beach.

It’s been a couple of weeks since we wrapped up the first ever HRVA Civic Hackfest and I’m long overdue for a recap of events and outcomes. There’s a silver lining around the cloud of communication, though, because the work has continued and continues to get more awesome.

To review: we hacked over three days and nights on public data from City of Norfolk Cultural Affairs and Hampton Roads Transit. We used a “civic hack-a-thon” model organized by the new Code for America Brigade to do the work. Three challenges were put the the developers and designers who answered our call for civic heros. During the event these civic hackers sprinted toward simple apps they could deploy over the weekend. This was particularly a challenge for the HRT data since it was still in a mostly “raw dump.” More than an app, we needed an API.

iArtNorfolk shows the locations of Norfolk public art relative to your location

HRVA Civic Hackfest yielded a winning app in iArtNorfolk. iArtNorfolk is a mobile, geo-aware interface to Norfolk’s existing public art data. Other teams also created a Ruby interface to the HRT bus data and a time adherence layer over HRT’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). The Ruby interface makes it easier for Ruby developers to use the data. Adding time adherence to GTFS means that riders can see how well buses on routes are sticking to their normal schedules.

All participants were awarded 30-day passes from HRT. All participants who presented their results received GoPass365.

As great as all that was and is, some of the most exciting aspects have unfolded since the event.

Norfolk Cultural Affairs will award $1000 to the iArtNorfolk team to host and maintain the project. Other city leaders are also interested in the project and want to know how mobile apps for Norfolk can invite the 500,000 expected visitors to OpSail to explore the city.

Real time locations of buses on Route 20

And finally (for now), we published a mobile & web app that shows the real time locations of HRT buses! The app shows the locations of by route on a Google map, together with each bus’s direction and time adherence (on time or minutes late).

If you want to know who all of these amazing people are to make this all happen, check out the guest list for the event, the email forum, and the git hub. There you’ll find citizen developers, city officials, data reporters, and all sorts of civic minded hackers who are working together to understand and improve the interfaces to Hampton Roads using the web and government as platforms for innovation.

If you want to participate, go to HRVA Brigade at brigade.codeforamerica.org, create a profile, and join the email forum. (Everything is public in case you want to follow along without participating.)

This calendar aggregates iCal feeds from Hampton Roads government calendars. The services is provided by elmcity and delicious. The curator is Kevin Curry. Unfortunately, not too many government calendars have a public feed. Contact @kmcurry if you know of a public HRVA gov iCal feed (.ics file)

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