OTSF recently contracted with Garnet Consulting to produce a set of case studies of OneBusAway deployments, to freshen up our website, and to write a one-page flyer that can be distributed to prospective users and at conferences. The flyer is now linked from the OneBusAway website, as are capsule summaries of the case studies. We also have interview transcripts and other details from the case studies available as needed.
The interviews confirmed that our users appreciate that OneBusAway is an open-source platform and that their data belongs to them. One interviewee said “When I hear OBA I think open source.” Another said they picked OneBusAway because “We wanted control of our data. We wanted to be able to leverage whatever we did without running into ‘who owns it’. We’ve been able to do what we want.” Using OneBusAway allows agencies to make decisions centered around their specific needs, without focusing on vendor restrictions. Interviewees also voiced appreciation for OneBusAway’s commitment to accessibility. One interviewee described that OneBusAway has “always put accessible information front and center.” Another user reported that blind riders on their internal committee “recommend the app to people because it works for them.”
Another takeaway from the interviews was that some OneBusAway users initially had confusion about what options were available for setting up OneBusAway for their agencies. To begin addressing this, we’ve made some updates to our website to make it clearer how to get started with OBA. We’ve also added case studies and a list of OneBusAway deployments to the site so that visitors can see examples of how different agencies are using and benefitting from OneBusAway.