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Technology

Welcome to our blog. Through it, we hope to offer insight into or products and technology, as well as some general news that we hope may affect your transportation habits.

Biking directions added to Google Maps

Today, our friends at the Seattle Google office announced the addition of biking directions and extensivee bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S.

With a nod to all the public support for adding biking directions, and the help of the Rails-toTrails Conservancy in collecting much of the necessary trail data, Google flipped the switch to allow users to receive directions by car, public transit, walking, or biking when planning trips on Google Maps.

The route planner considers bicycle facilities, topography, intersection quality, and traffic to plan directions. Detailed bicycle infrastructure information (bike lanes, boulevards, etc.) is available for about 150 cities in the U.S.

You can learn all about the many factors and variables taken into account on Google's Lat Long Blog. Or, for a quick 2-minute overview of using biking directions, watch this helpful video.

                        

 

Posted by Zac Corker on March 10, 2010.

CityGoRound.org shines light on public transit data

Front Seat, the Seattle-based team that brought us WalkScore, has recently released a new website where visitors can find public transit applications in their city, and see a list of which transit agencies make their data publicily available to software developers and which agencies do not.

CityGoRound.org launched today, and we here at Goose Networks are pleased to see that the website highlights the need for open transit data, and recognizes and thanks those agencies that already provide their data to third party developers.

“We are calling on transit agencies nationwide to open their data and follow the lead of the Open Government Directive issued this week by the White House,” said Mike Mathieu, Founder and Chairman of Front Seat. “City-Go-Round’s transit apps are a concrete example of how open data can improve citizens’ lives on a daily basis.”

There are 748 transit agencies in the U.S., 84 of which provide their schedule data to software developers. The largest three transit agencies with no open data are: MTA New York City Transit, New Jersey Transit Corporation, and Metro-North Commuter Railroad Company in New York. Visitors to City-Go-Round can add their name to a request for open public transit data in their city.

Posted by Zac Corker on December 10, 2009.

Face to face meetings - no travel required

In the “no commute at all” category, the New York Times has a good high-level survey of teleconferencing technology today.  Predictably, the cost of high-end systems from Cisco and HP is dropping quickly and lower cost solutions like WebEx are becoming ubiquitous.  The article quotes a customer service trainer at Subaru who estimates she now reaches 2,500 people every six months instead of 220 at a cost of $.75 per person instead of $300.

It’s a bit facetious to state, but ‘not going’ is by far the cheapest form of transportation and it’s an increasingly valid choice for a lot of business travel, whether by air or road. 

Posted by Charlie Crissman on July 22, 2008.
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