TransitCamp Ideally: Promote Simplicity and Ubiquitousness

TransitCamp Ideally: Promote Simplicity and Ubiquitousness

Tara Hunt has a post up about TransitCamp (a camp held in about a month at SocialText with the help of Heyward Robinson, Menlo Park city council, Adina Levin, Co Founder of Social Text and avid Menlo Park community activist, Margaret Okuzumi, from the Bay Rail Alliance and MTC).

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The common thread across all those cities is that the interface, and the metaphor, is simplicity and instant access with little mental overhead. In other words, you don’t have to know much to use them, other than to find an outlet and get in. Then after locating a map, you buy a pass and unless it’s very late (after midnight or 2am depending) or very early (before 6am), you wait a few minutes and your train, bus or trolley shows up. And you’re off. And it works from the airports too! Yipee!

The way Bay Area transit works is: you are a commuter, you already know the complicated and dysfunctional system section you use all the time and the rest is a byzantine mess of mismatched numerous connections, so therefore the regular user only will move say, one leg to get where you are going or maybe two at the most. Oh and you are doing this almost exclusively during commute hours in order to have any efficiency at all.

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I’d rather not drive, but how the heck do you manage my typical day of meetings like say, last Thursday?
AM: 9:30 meeting in the mission, 11am in Cole Valley, PM: 12pm in the outer Sunset, 2pm in San Bruno, 6:30pm in SF for dinner, 10pm in Emeryville, 11pm home. All of which I easily made in the car, but with transit in the BA, I’d have to plan two hours between each meeting and an hour home on the last leg. In NYC, each bridge to the next event would be 15-30 minutes (what I’d planned for driving between each thing I needed to get done).

— via Napsterization

There have been two prior TransitCamp events in Toronto and Vancouver, both using the BarCamp conference model. Based on what I can see on their sites, they were a valuable experience. I’ve been using Bay Area transit for three years, so I’ll definitely attend. There’s a clear statement of “How do we improve this?” rather than “What do we hate about this?”, which is immensely cheering.