A hop, skip and a click away

Connections at Portland’s Rose Quarter Transit Center are made easier by a growing number of Web-based transit tools.

When Chinedu Eheruo moved to New York City he needed to know how to get around. He wasn’t interested in driving, and puzzling together routes on the public transportation system wasn’t much fun. Why couldn’t someone put together a Web site that would use maps of the region, along with all the information about transit systems in New York, to help plan a route?

“Driving directions were well-served, but no one had really gone in and done the programming necessary to navigate the transit system in New York City,” said Bill Raffo, a media representative for HopStop.com.

So Eheruo set out on his own and in November 2004 created a program to map the transit system. He wanted to identify the fastest bus and subway routes, shortest walking distances, and the best combinations of the two.

While it may have led the way on the East Coast, HopStop.com isn’t alone. Across the country, bus, subway, light-rail, and commuter-rail users are looking for better ways to plan their trips, and they’re asking transit authorities to provide them with the data they need. For transit authorities squeezed by higher fuel costs and tighter budgets, the incursion of entrepreneurs into the trip-planning business could be a boon.

Many of these entrepreneurs are trusting in the growth of online advertising to support their endeavors. Web-based private trip-planning systems may provide retailers and restaurants opportunities for location-specific advertising. As of December, online advertising for the year was expected to total $13.2 billion, or 4.7 percent of total advertising sales, according to JMP Securities. JMP also predicts online ad sales could account for 11.1 percent of all advertising by 2010.

HopStop.com entices advertisers with the possibility of “Real Real Local” advertising.

“HopStop can combine user location information to deliver very targeted and powerful marketing messages to consumers,” boasts the company media kit. “Your advertising banner can be displayed when a Web site user seeks directions to a location near your business address. Or we could only show ads to users in a particular borough or city.”

Despite the opportunities such technology  offers, there are still technical kinks to be worked out when transit data is involved. When Eheruo began work on HopStop.com, he discovered that the Mass Transit Authority and the New York City Department of Transportation couldn’t provide the data he needed.

“Transit data is very complex, more so than most data sets, because it’s got a time element associated with it,” said Bibiana McHugh, IT manager of Geographic Information Systems for TriMet in Portland. “Every bus stop has a location and many times associated with it, many routes associated with it.”

Because of the complexity, transit authorities have different ways of organizing their databases for creating maps and trip planners. Often, programmers seeking to use this data wind up in a snarl of mismatched and unavailable data. TriMet is on a mission to change that. The Portland area transit provider makes its data publicly available on the TriMet Web site.

In June 2005, McHugh approached Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) about providing TriMet’s data to the company’s developers. In early December, Google launched its Google Transit Trip Planner, which provides trip planning and a cost comparison with driving for the Portland Metro area.

While TriMet’s own trip planner provides more options than Google’s first release, McHugh is optimistic about the benefits of Google Transit.

Someday, transit-savvy business travelers shuttling from city to city will be able to go to Google first, McHugh suggested. “It’s going to have to go nationwide for it to be successful,” she said.

TriMet hosted a workshop in October on the development of transit data standards. Transit agencies from Oakland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere attended the workshop. Most of the attendees are working to collaborate with Google, McHugh said.

In the meantime, independent Web developers are forging ahead. In Seattle, BusMonster.com uses Google Maps and King County’s online trip planner to help users find stops and routes, while PortlandTransport.com has developed a Transit Surfer that provides real-time schedule information for Web-enabled cell-phones and PDAs.