Project Rationale
Transport is a crucial aspect of modern societies, but it also has a significant impact on the planet in multiple ways. A big part of creating Sustainable cities needs to be working out how to co-evolve wikipedia:Sustainable Transportation systems.
Given the size and complexity of cities, it is natural to want to use the power of computers, especially GIS tools, to support understanding, managing and evolving our transport systems. Yet, much of the existing work towards building such capability and software systems is problematic in two ways:
- Much of the computer tools for analysing transport that came out of the developed world countries, especially the United States, focused on managing and planning transport with the assumption that the private car would be the clearly dominant mode of transport. Yet this is problematic given what we now know of the negative environmental and social side effects of too much car reliance.
- Much software that supports understanding and analysing transport systems is developed and sold in a proprietary mode, often for considerable sums, thus tending to restrict their use to government departments and for-profit consultancies. But if sustainable transportation is 'everybody's problem', shouldn't we try to reduce the barriers as low as possible for different groups and people in society to understand their region's transport system, and work and advocate for possible improvements?
Given the rapid increase in computer and internet spread over last few decades, many good tools of this sort have been developed.
However, the goal of this project is to use judgement to select what are the best tools already developed to be re-used, what is the most valuable aspects to be added/modified next, and how to integrate efforts in a mutually-supportive way in the long term.
Project goals
The goal is to work iteratively and collaboratively to develop an open source 'informatics' platform that supports understanding cities' existing transport systems, and as a decision-support tool that allows looking at options that suggest they will support a more sustainable transport system.
The core design goals of the system should be:
- Sustainable transport as a core design goal, not an add-on to modelling the status-quo. E.g. focus limited development resources around the most promising aspects of the system to improve sustainability of transport for large urban regions given current research.
- An informatics tool, that allows "scalable complexity" to support different types of users with different goals and data availabilities. For example, when data, time and resources are limited, support 'sketch planning' to visualise the impacts of adding public transport services. When the above resources are more available - then be able to call on more complex models and simulations, e.g. long-term predictions of integrated transport and land-use changes.
- Modularity, flexibilty, and update-ability.
Design and initial R&D work
In the long-term, such a platform would include not just software, but:
- Open Source software packages, and guides and howto's to put them together.
- Openly published data standards for key relevant aspects of the info system, e.g. public transport networks and timetables
- Plans and protocols for the effective transfer of such data (e.g. web services)
- Known good sources of data, such as government providers.
- Documentation of suggested necessary computer hardware needed to run such a platform, in either basic or advanced forms.
Costs
It's too early to seriously estimate costs at this stage.
However, the philosophy here would be to follow and the networked, distributed nature of Open Source development - and also the iterative approach of Agile software development. That is, in the short to medium term goals should be modest and match the resuources available, and leverage existing efforts as much as possible. Then as tools are field-tested and learning is involved and more stakeholders get interested - more ambitious goals can be attempted.
Discussion
Your discussion.
Next steps
The current next step that PatrickSunter is driving with collaborators is developing and testing an open source public transport network informatics platform to support analysis and planning for public transport network improvements.
If others were interested in contributing :- I think a great thing would be to see public-transport oriented informatics platforms integrated with bike-oriented tools - which is possibly a very strong combination for a transport systems that includes both broad coverage, but low negative impact.
References
Contact details
-- PatSunter
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