In this four minute video from TED, venture capitalist Gary Lauder offers a rapid-fire argument for a broad approach to thinking about the relationship between driver behavior and transportation efficiency.
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Yesterday, Microsoft announced on the Bing community blog that Bing Maps will be adding transit routing to its directions options.
Initially transit directions will be available in just 11 major North American cities (Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, and Vancouver), though Microsoft has indicated its intention to expand transit directions to additional markets.
This addition helps Bing Maps to match a feature already available in Google Maps, the latter having a significant head start as Google Transit currently offers transit directions in more than 446 cities worldwide.
We congratulate Bing Maps on this new feature. Microsoft adding transit routing to its signature mapping product serves as an indicator of the growing popularity of online transportation planning tools, and the importance of transit agencies making transit schedule data publicly available to software developers.
Yesterday brought a bit of excitement to Goose Networks' Seattle offices.
On Tuesday, August 17, 2010, Barack Obama, the 44th and current President of the United States, made a quick six hour stop here in the Emerald City.
The President's first stop? The Grand Central Bakery, a few floors below our office and a long-time favorite among Goose staffers.
Here's an account of the President placing his lunch order, as retold by a member of the White House advance team:
Quick drive along empty streets, past Safeco Field, with clusters of people periodically lining the cleared route. Those crowds thicken as we reach the leafy downtown. Cheering as motorcade stops in front of brick building with the Grand Central Bakery inside.
"Hey guys, how are you? Great place, really beautiful neighborhood." He greets the staff behind the counter. "What's your name?" (There's an Andrea and a Rachel.)
He turns down a local salad with strawberries, even though he acknowledges it sounds good. Then decides on a half a turkey sandwich (described by staff as "Thanksgiving in a sandwich"), a smaller version of that local salad, and a bottle of water. Also gets "something sweet to go."
"You gotta ring me up," he tells them, though they seem not really sure about that. He tells them again, laughing, they really have to.
And so you have it -- even the President pays for his half turkey sandwich at the Grand Central.
Think your local commute is bad? Maybe, but at least you're not in Moscow.
In the Aug 2 eition of The New Yorker Magazine, writer Keith Gessen offers a grim account of the gridlock that grips the Russian capital.
Gessen presents the source of the city's traffic challenges as part historical (Moscow's early rulers built the city as a concentric series of walled forts, with the Kremlin at the center, preventing the diversion of traffic to side roads), part political (the city's elite are afforded driving privileges that serve to cripple the regular flow of traffic), and part cultural (while sitting stuck in traffic is not desireable, it beats the endless lines endured by Muscovites during communist rule).
The article also discusses the innovative approach taken by Yandex, Russia's largest internet company, in the display of real-time traffic data throughout the city. While other cities use sensors embedded in the pavement to measure traffic flow, in Moscow these have a hard time surviving both the weather and the road repairs the weather necessitates. So, Yandex asks drivers to download software onto their GPS-equipped mobile devices so to that information about their movements can be sent automatically to the Yandex servers. As the program grows, Yandex is able to give an increasingly accurate and encompassing picture of Moscow's traffic situation at any given moment.
Hot on the heels of our myFleet iPad App, we're excited to announce the release of our new iPhone application.
Now available to Enterprise and Custom Edition customers, this App offers iPhone based schedules, trip planning, and rider alerts. The App is ready for out-of-the-box enterprise deployment, or as a starting point for further customization by an in-house development team.
Call us today to learn more about the capabilities and deployment options for the Goose iPhone App.
Here at Goose Networks, we were excited to get our hands on an early edition of Apple's new touch-screen tablet device, the iPad.
We've always believed that mobile technology can play a powerful role in influencing transportation habits. And, if you believe any of the recent buzz, it's clear the iPad has the potential to significantly impact mobile computing.
While we were eager to see the iPad for the same reasons as others -- web-browsing, streaming videos, ebooks -- we were most eager to answer the question, 'What can the iPad do for our customers?' Specifically, how might the iPad serve to compliment our efforts to help customers improve transportation efficiency at their organizations?
So, after tinkering with the iPad for over a week now, what have we found?
For starters, we made a few key observations that shaped our development of the myFleet App. First, we concluded that any initial effort should focus on providing a tool for transportation administrators. While the iPad has proven an early hit with Apple die-hards, it remains to be seen if the device will gain traction with the average consumer. And, until it does, the utility of a broadly targeted apps will be limited.
Second, in order to best leverage the mobility of the iPad, we felt it was important to provide a tool that would have real on-the-go value. Finally, we wanted to take full advantage of unique iPad display elements, namely the split-view navigation and popover displays.
The result? The Goose myFleet iPad App, an on-the-go tool for shuttle fleet management. With myFleet, transportation administrators can take full advantage of the iPad's remarkable capabilities to:
- View real-time vehicle location
- Access ridership reports
- Manage SMS alerts anytime, anywhere
The myFleet iPad App is currently available to Enterprise and Custom Edition customers. Please contact us to learn more.
Though our web-based schedules offer users universal access -- your riders can access schedules from anywhere they have internet access; from the office, from home, or via mobile phone -- there are occasions when a good, old-fashioned, printed schedule can be helpful.
After hearing the request for print friendly schedules from a number of our customers, we've updated our schedules tool to include an option for printer-friendly PDF timetables.
To access a print friendly version of a schedule, follow these three simple steps:
- Open your browser window to your organization's shuttle schedules page. (If you're not currently a Goose customer, you can test drive this feature in our web-based schedules live demo.)
- Next, select a route. This will open the web-based version of this route's schedule.
- Just above the schedule timetable, and to the right of the route name, you'll see a PDF icon. Simply click this button to download a printer-friendly PDF version of this time timetable.
Note that if the selected route travels in two directions, the print friendly version will include both directions of that route.
We've been playing with text messaging (SMS) technology at Goose Networks since our early experiments with real-time ridesharing back in 2006. With SMS in our ‘Corporate DNA,’ we were all the more excited to roll out our 'SMS Alerts' feature to clients in late 2009.
With SMS alerts, clients can set up distribution lists (d-lists) for specific shuttle/transit routes (i.e. 'Red Line Alerts') or other groups (i.e. 'General Commuter Alerts'). Users register their mobile phones to receive alerts from one or more list, and program administrators can send out alerts at their convenience via the Admin Control Panel's 'SMS Campaigns' tool.
We like to think that we've kept the feature simple from end-to-end. This was important to us, since things are actually fairly complicated under the hood. What could be complicated about sending text messages? For starters, imagine that you're offering an SMS alerts program for the Red Bus line, and one of your subscribers decides to cancel his cell phone plan and switch to a different operator (with a different phone number). When he does so, his old number will eventually get recycled and given to a new cell phone customer. That person doesn't expect to receive SMS alerts about the Red Line, and will probably consider any such alerts unwanted SPAM. Luckily for you, we've put systems in place to make such an outcome impossible. By working diligently with each of the major US mobile phone operators (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.), we can track when phone numbers get taken offline or recycled, and automatically unsubscribe them from any our of d-lists before they receive unwanted campaign messages.
While SMS is considerably more complex than email, we've done to our best to hide that complexity behind an extremely simple, intuitive tool; it is our hope that we've been able to make sending an SMS alert as simple as sending an email campaign via the Goose Mailing List manager.
If you're interested in offering SMS Alerts to your riders, please contact us to set up a live demo -- we'd love to show you this tool in action.
The Northwest’s largest pediatric medical and research center, Seattle Children’s Hospital needed creative solutions to manage employee commuting and parking and capture lost revenue.
With the help of a dynamic commuter management system designed by Goose, the hospital has improved its bottom line while encouraging and rewarding the use of alternative transportation.
To learn more about how we helped Seattle Children's to increase parking revenue, reduce demand for on-site parking, and track shuttle ridership, dowload our case study, or read a summary online on our website.
Every day some of the world’s most respected companies and organizations depend on Goose's commuter management technology to promote, administer, and measure the impacts of their transportation initiatives.
To help tell their story, and illustrate how your organization can leverage Goose technology to promote your own sustainable transportation goals, we're producing a series of customer case studies.
Our first case study profiles Venture, CA based Patagonia. Download the full-length case study (2 page) as a PDF, or read a summary online on our website.