pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

This week, former University of Washington PhD student, Kari Watkins, joined us to present a ten year retrospective on OneBusAway on the UW campus in Seattle. Dr. Watkins, now an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech, began work on OneBusAway with several other UW students and faculty back in 2008. For those not familiar, OneBusAway is an open source platform for real time transit information which originally launched in Seattle in 2011 and is now operating in several cities across the country and around the world.

After sharing some background about the impetus for the project, Dr. Watkins went on to share about some of the great research that she and her students have done using the data that has become available do to the process of developing this service. She also spoke about some of the functions that they still hope to include moving forward such as crowd sourcing data gathering. The original project was funded by PacTrans’ predecessor, TransNOW, the regional University Transportation Center that operated for over 20 years prior to PacTrans. We were very grateful and fortunate to get to hear from Dr. Watkins about this great work!

Beyond simply sharing about the research, Dr. Watkins’ underlying theme through this presentation was about openness and sharing. The code for this platform is open source so that public agencies around the world can either implement it via OneBusAway, or use the code to build a custom platform that better suits their local needs, such as is the case in New York City. During the Q & A there was some considerable discussion about data availability, privacy, and efficacy of data.