After ten years of existence, OneBusAway keeps on growing. At the Transportation Research Board conference in Washington DC earlier this month, OneBusAway joined forces with OpenTripPlanner to host its annual meeting. The open-source community got together to share the year’s accomplishments and discuss next steps. This year, open-source developers have added new features into the app. Sean Barbeau from USF worked with Microsoft Research to add Embedded Social, a new social platform allowing users to make comments. Links to regional fare payment apps were added for Tampa, Puget Sound, and Sand Diego. HART worked with Cambridge Systematics to deploy a new service alerts platform developed in coordination with WMATA. Sean Crudden developed a new prediction method (part of TheTransitClock) based on machine learning to better forecast vehicle arrivals in unstable conditions such as passenger crowding, inclement weather, and congestion. The mobile app is being deployed all over the world. New instances were implemented in Sroda Wielkopolska, Poland, Jackson County, Oregon, and more. San Diego MTS now runs OneBusAway on its website and as its native app. HART in Tampa, FL, integrated its streetcar service into the app. Ten years after getting started by two Ph.D. students at University of Washington, …

Ten Years Later, OneBusAway Still Thrives Read more »

Are you newer to the open-source community, perhaps looking to learn more? As you can see on our website, there are benefits to transit agencies in the form of more control and less overall cost to provide riders tools. Open-source is also a community, where coders can invest their time to improve transit tools to make service better and more accessible for riders. Along with our duties of keeping OneBusAway running, many of us serve as advocates for better transit tools, promoters of open and standardized transit data, and researchers trying to understand the implications of rider tools. As part of this, we are trying to create a stronger community around all of these issues, especially open-source code in the transit world. For this reason, we are teaming up with one of the other major partners in open-source tools, OpenTripPlanner to host a joint event at TRB. We’re meeting Sunday, January 13 from 11 am to 3 pm at the Marriott. We’ll also have a phone line if you aren’t attending TRB, but are interested in learning more. Contact Kari Watkins at kari.watkins@ce.gatech.edu if you’d like the call-in information. Here is an Eventbrite invitation, including the agenda. And if you are unable …

OneBusAway annual meeting 13 Jan 2019, and invitation to learn more about open source Read more »