Transit
London's Chromaroma makes riding transit a game
Traveling around a city is typically considered a chore, something necessary to get from point A to point B. But why can't the journey be the fun part? A game called Chromaroma does that in London:
People sign up and let Chromaroma track their movements using their Oyster cards, the London version of SmarTrip. People can see brightly colored visualizations of their travel, earn "points" for traveling, join teams to amass the most points and even complete "missions" like going to certain locations.
This is all possible because Transport for London has been willing to let Chromaroma access the travel data for individual members. That's not a type of open data that WMATA or other local agencies yet support, but we could imagine a lot of great applications if an individual user can grant permission for a tool to access their personal data (but only if they so choose).
It's the same way that Twitter of Facebook have applications that access your personal information: The application can't see your tweets or your wall until you specifically grant it access. This "platform" strategy has done a lot to make these social networks the big powerhouses they are. A transit data "platform" could allow making riding much more fun.
Via Good.
 | David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington. He has had a lifelong interest in great cities and great communities. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.   |
Comments
- Successful speed cameras require fair speed limits
- VDOT ignores own data, pushes widening I-66
- DC's divide need not be black and white
- Preservationists ask to shrink 3rd Church replacement
- Live chat: Matt Yglesias, Wednesday at noon
- Half-hour Metro headways are not acceptable
- "Degree density" maps show region's east-west divide
Holborn Viaduct, Rotherhithe, Parsons Green, Picadilly...
by Matt Caywood on Dec 8, 2011 2:00 pm
by RVA_Exile on Dec 8, 2011 2:22 pm
by Dave Murphy on Dec 8, 2011 5:41 pm
I feel like you could glean the same kind of information just using anonymous, separated open data about individual transit customers. E.g. the open data stream would separate customers out but you wouldn't be able to tell who is who, and you wouldn't be able to connect one trip to the next for a single person.
Personally I think it would be cool to see this information visualized, and clearly the transit agencies have access to this kind of information, but I'm not sure how comfortable I would be handing it over to a private company to compile a database of my every transit move.
by MLD on Dec 8, 2011 5:52 pm
What Chromaroma is doing is using credentials supplied by users to screen-scrape the Oyster site. I don't know whether they have TfL's consent to do so or not. Either way, screen-scraping is absolutely not a best practice.
There is no privacy issue here with respect to the journey data; while TfL releases aggregate origin-destination data, some of which comes from Oyster records, there's no PII in those datasets, and, besides, as far as I know those datasets are not relevant to Chromaroma. The only data Chromaroma has access to is for users who have given their Oyster credentials to the site. Presumably those users understand the privacy risks of allowing Chromaroma to access their Oyster account.
Chromaroma actually also scrapes the Barclays Cycle Hire site, since while the PBSC system provides an API for system status, there's no authenticated API to get a user's rental history.
For the record, it's not too hard to screen-scrape the SmarTrip site, either.
by Kurt Raschke on Dec 8, 2011 6:06 pm
by Jasper on Dec 8, 2011 8:12 pm
by Lance on Dec 8, 2011 10:52 pm
Yeah. It's too bad no one has created an app to help make the nightmarish activity of driving in an urban area more fun. Especially in London, where it is without question far worse than here.
by Matt Johnson on Dec 8, 2011 10:56 pm
by Lance on Dec 9, 2011 12:08 am
Funny, that's how I feel about transit there, too. I guess our anecdotes cancel each other out.
by Matt Johnson on Dec 9, 2011 7:39 am
Then they coerce you to register the card [by refusing to replace a dead card/transferring its balance] & even demand your DoB.
Sure they will tell you "we don't sell that data" and my response would "that's today...and you are always short of money. What happens tomorrow..."?
[BTW, they also willingly give it to any cops who ask; no warrant or probable cause necessary...]
by george b on Dec 28, 2011 2:10 pm
Add a Comment