October 5, 2010
New York Transit gets mobile, social, collaborative
Posted by: Jessica Vaughn - New York in North America
From packing like sardines into subways to dealing with frequent construction delays and paying for pricey cab rides into the outer boroughs, getting around in the city that never sleeps can leave your average New Yorker grouchy to say the least. Fortunately, a few fed-up New Yorkers have set out to improve the transit experience by turning it into a mobile, collaborative, social endeavor.
Weeels, for example, is a new taxi-sharing app that quickly matches would-be taxi riders with nearby passengers with similar routes—saving money, time and some carbon emissions in the process. Roadify, is an SMS-based service—currently operating in Park Slope, Brooklyn—that compiles user-generated data to provide real-time status updates on parking spots and public transit. Drivers vacating a parking spot can text the Roadify network; anyone nearby who’s seeking a spot can text to claim the vacancy. For bus riders, passengers can provide real-time location info for people further down the route—much more helpful than the notoriously unreliable printed timetables. Aside from plain old good karma, participants earn “streetCARma” points, good for local discounts.
For New Yorkers who travel by bike, SoBi is a social bicycle system, pairing the idea of urban bike-sharing programs—which have spread like wildfire around Europe, Asia and parts of North America—with mobile technology. The system, which will begin trials this fall, “uses GPS, mobile communications and a secure lock that can attach to almost any bicycle, and lock around any regular bike rack,” reducing startup and infrastructure costs by more than two-thirds, according to the SoBi folks. People looking to rent a bike would find the nearest available one through their phone’s GPS; from there, the bike is unlocked and tracked through the user’s phone.
These services are riding the global Collaborative Consumption wave, which we discussed recently with Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine Is Yours. And they hint at the myriad ways our digital traces and mobile phone addictions can be used to improve our urban lives. It will be interesting to see how developing nations, many of which lack resources for traditional urban planning, leapfrog these processes to build smarter hyper-connected and ultimately more efficient cities of tomorrow. As our influencer Nathan Eagle of txteagle pointed out in March, the “massive amount of data that’s being generated can be used to better design cities, to build better disease surveillance models, to do things that ultimately are going to improve the lives of billions of people.”
