TransLinked

Adopt-A-Stop — a proposal for the Knight News Challenge

Your intrepid authors, one counti8 and one sillygwailo, present to you, our comrades in transit love, Adopt-a-Stop — our awesome idea for a web application to nurture community interaction around transit. Beyond just writing this blog, yo.

The basic gist? Here in Vancouver, every bus stop in the system has a 5 digit ID, and now we also have geographic information for each stop thanks to TransLink’s recent release of their data in the GTFS. The long and the short of it is:

We want people to be able to find and create stories with their cellphones that are associated with bus stops.

And by cellphones, we mean iPhones, and those things that can send SMS and little else, and everything in between. Which, most intriguingly for us, means people can send Twitter updates with 5-digit bus stop hashtags. In other words, geo-tag your 135 characters from your dumb phone!

Plus, since we have the lat-long for all the bus stops, we can also pull in geo-tagged pictures, videos, Tumblr posts, check-ins from Bright Kite, etc. And, most importantly, the view from Google Street View — so you can, say, see what the stop looks like before you get there.

Our initial brainstorm at the Vancouver Data Hackathon.

Bottom line:

1. Register and vote for it!
2. Leave a comment if you have something to say about it!
3. Tell urs friends.

P.S. Karen writes more about some of the thinking behind Adopt-A-Stop on her blog here too.

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