MyTTC.ca is a community effort to give everyone free, open access to a better quality of transit information in Toronto. Since the first TransitCamp in 2007, Kevin Branigan and I have been working to re-build our own set of TTC data, as well as exploring different ways to visualize, display and distribute it. MyTTC.ca is, at least in part, how we’re expressing that data on the web.

The data available from the TTC was, well, a little lacking in both quality and quantity. With fewer than 20% of the stops available and a staggering error rate on the TTC site (both new and old), Kevin and I reasoned that we’d need to build our own data set if we were going to do anything useful with it. Fortunately, we were able to find just enough good data to do just that, and with that data at our disposal we finally had the stable base we needed to build fun and useful applications. (more…)

Image of a Viva kiosk

What do VIVA bus riders, Google employees, and Pearson airport bound travelers have in common? All have been envisioned as transit riders who can make use of wireless internet access on the bus.

The VIVA buses in York Region are sometimes described as innovative and high tech. This description is tied in part to the planned provision of wireless internet access on board. Online materials from York University and York Region from 2005 and 2006 describe this future vision for the system. Here in 2008, I rode the Viva bus down Yonge Street to Finch station with my laptop powered on a couple of weeks ago. There was no wireless signal detected from Viva yet. While, I wait to get online with Viva, let us consider other buses that currently offer wireless access with a green twist.

The Google bus service was started in 2004 to transport employees between San Francisco and the Mountain View location of the company. As reported on a Google blog page, the bus runs on biodiesel and takes employees’ cars off the road.

Locally, the Toronto Airport Express provides wireless for riders traveling between the downtown core and the airport. For a much higher fare than the TTC’s 192 red rocket route, the Airport Express fare of $18.95 allows riders to slide into leather seats and login to the internet. As reported on the CBC the bus engine is low-emission and a green alternative.

Following Sameer’s lead with his previous blog entry on parking perks, I think it is important to consider the benefits of particular transit choices. In the future, internet access integrated with green transit vehicles may be more widely available to us here in the GTHA.

As comments by Ian Milligan raised the subject of an ever ongoing perception among people that use public transit in Sameer Vasta’s “Pulling Parking Perks” post, I thought about the reasons that this perception exists.  What could be responsible for people preferring rail vehicles to the bus?

Toronto has a rich history of public transit going back to the mid-1800s.  The first bus service started in the early 1850s, but streetcars have been on Toronto’s streets since as early as 1861.  They were horse-drawn originally, but they introduced electric cars in the early 1890s, starting with Church St.  Subway proposals have been floated since around 1910. (more…)