Evil Twins

Transit Miami brings us Walk Score's evil twin. Drive Score...dun dun dun.

RSS Feeds and Information Sharing

Much of the information I use for this blog comes from Google Alerts or RSS feeds. However there are a number of sites that still don't have feeds. In order to give some encouragement to these folks, I'd like to list them in no particular order to introduce people but also in hopes that they'll slide into the information age.

Update: There is an RSS Feed here for Progressive Railroading.
Update 2: Railway Technology has a feed here.

Progressive Railroading - News compilation organization.
Railway Age - More railroads than transit but it would be nice to get feeds on articles that are in the most recent edition
Light Rail Now! - I know a lot of folks get info from Lyndon and Dave. I've pestered them about feeds a few times as have others.
APTA Heritage Trolley - Updates news about streetcars and heritage streetcars around the country.
CFTE - Election central for transit ballot measures
Citizens for Modern Transit St. Louis - Tom Shrout and Co are doing a great job in STL.
CfPT Atlanta - Folks doing good work in Atlanta
FTA - A feed needed please
Journal of Transport and Land Use - Not publishing yet, but when they do...
LRTA - International Light Rail News
Railway Technology - Updates from around the world.

And many more. If anyone wants to send any of these folks in email asking them nicely to get an rss feed that would be awesome. I've already emailed a few with mixed results. Also, if anyone has any other sites to add let me know.

Live Blogging from Rail~Volution

Here we are in windy and sometimes rainy sometimes sunny Miami for Rail~Volution. We start our panel in about an hour and a half. We're going to talk about visualizations for new transit projects. Also, there will be a discussion on how visualization is going to now be required for large federal projects. Then we'll talk about blogging. Check out Steve's page (Urban Review St. Louis) who is on the panel with me. He's really good about catching folks parking where they aren't supposed to park and talking about urban issues.

Update: 3:10 ET Effie Stallsmith is up from the Federal Transit Administration and Steve is live blogging over at Urban Review St. Louis linked above.

Update: 3:30 ET Effie discusses transportation departments taking their plans and meetings to myspace.

Steve pointed out a youtube about RSS feeds. A lot of folks know how this works so you don't have to watch it, but I thought it was of interested to folks out there who are tired of going to different sites looking for new content. Why not make it come to you?

Flexcar Merges With Zipcar

I think car sharing is important to transit orientation. Because automobiles will always be a useful tool in the transportation toolchest, having available cars for people who need to run an errand or go out of town to an area not served by transit is great. It also cuts down on needed parking spaces and creates an environment for using transit as a main mode of transport. I'm not quite sure what the merger means but other folks have been covering it so I'll let them do the commentary.

Orphan Road
Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space
Portland Transport
Xing Columbus

New Transit Advocate Resource

Ok, I've started a new blog, City Transit Advocates. I'm not going to abandon this one but this is an addition that hopefully will be useful to everyone. Basically what I did is took the transit advocate blogs in my blogroll and aggregated their RSS feeds. There are 20 titles and one blog can only have two posts. This makes sure that blogs which post more often don't hog all the space.

Also, if anyone has any additions or knows of a good transit advocate blog to add to the aggregation that isn't there let me know. theoverheadwire at gmail dot com. There is a list of all the blogs in the aggregator at the right of the page.

I hope this is a positive addition to the transit blogosphere and allows people to get a look at what is happening in different cities.

Transit Board at Portland Transport

A cool new tool for folks to use. They explain more at Portland Transport:

Transit Board is a web browser interface designed to be used in a fixed location, perhaps as a kiosk or as an intranet page for a company office, allowing users to see multiple transit lines departing from a particular place or general vicinity.

One TMA has already implemented it.

There are two ways to set up a Transit Board. One requires help from the admins at Portland Transport, the other can be done on a do-it-yourself basis.

The first model requires defining something we call a 'choice set', which is a list of transit stops and specific lines that serve them. If you'd like to do this, send e-mail to webmaster@portlandtransport.com and we'll work with you. With the custom approach we can tailor colors and create special messages as well.

The do-it-yourself form just requires a URL with a list of stops.