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Have Open Standards Delivered ITS Architectures that Matter?
- 1. Have Open Standards Delivered ITS Architectures that Matter? A Passenger Information Perspective
- 2. U.S. National ITS Architecture Framework and Template
- 3. In the beginning, there was analog Boston Transit Commission Report, 1890s
- 5. 2000-2006 Standards Era TCIP – Passenger Information group Good: Standards Process Bad: No major implementations Backward looking: Year 2000 technology (Not thought through for web / mobile clients) Ugly: Documentation “cumbersome at best, impossible at worst”
- 6. 2005 - 2006
- 7. 2007
- 8. 2008
- 13. Have Open Standards Delivered ITS Architectures that Matter? YES!
- 14. The real question The private sector uses sizeable public investments for profit. What are the incentives to push the next gen of tech forward?
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon. Thank you Rob for the introduction. Can I have a show of hands: who remembers what was in the upper left of that big national ITS architecture diagram?
- That is… Passenger Information! in answering the panel’s question I focus on only a portion of the National ITS Architecture, and I’m going to focus on transit. I'm going to take a strong stand on this question and make three arguments on my way to an answer: * The evolution of ITS has seen the scale of information distribution grow over time. * The private sector has really driven the state of the art for passenger information. * In this space, the work put into National ITS standards have not had good ROIs.
- First, a bit of history. Electronic passenger information is not something of the 21st century. The first subway in America, Boston, had electronic passenger information signs in the 1890s. But both the provision and reach of information was severely limited. Driving this was someone behind a switchboard.
- Fast forward to the end of the 20th century. We have systems that make passenger information available at a city-wide scale. Here is one such sign. While the data were available systemwide, in the beginning it was only available to the agency and through this manufacturer's product***. The only reason we know what the interface for these signs looks like is because of a Finnish hacker. She was playing around with a spectrum analyzer, found something interesting and decided to take a look.
- After deploying a host of single vendor solutions, the industry began to understand the downsides of end-to-end functionality from one vendor. from a panel of experts on passenger information and, after a standard standards-development process, TCIP was born. But it has it's issues, and no one has used the Passenger Information messages at large scale. No one took this standard as an example and said, “hey I want to build a system with that.” Contrast this with the NTCIP standards, where the documentation is succinct and accessible. I left this as the only slide with substantial text to make a point ;)
- The tech sector has taken a separate track. In 2006 Google finalized the first version of GTFS. This was part of moving from a search company, to a data company. Rather than trying to understand national ITS diagram, they addressed this as a tech company would, in an agile fashion with a minimum viable product first. They worked with one agency, TriMet in Portland, to iterate a working product before putting it out. Put simply, without a flagship project, a standard is worthless. Google saw world of opportunities for data, and they have driven the market ever since.
- The iPhone ushered in a world of opportunities for end users. Smartphones have driven ubiquitous information.
- But that ubiquitous information took a little while to get into this form factor. In 2008, with the addition of apps to iOS, Google brought transit directions to the iPhone.
- In 2011, Google introduced GTFS-RT, allowing agencies to provide real time updates for an entire fleet. A number of transit apps sprung up taking GTFS, GTFS-RT, and other information together. Here we have Citimapper, Moovit and The Transit App.
- These have gotten attention, and funding from the tech community. For example, in 2014 Citymapper received $10M in funding.
- Moovit raised a total of $81.5M. What’s most interesting is who is funding them. In addition to regular tech venture capitalists, BMW and Keolis (a branch of the French National Railways) have contributed.
- What they see in these apps are not just national but global ITS architectures. And they do this because they see money. Regional architectures passenger information have not reached that level of prominence.
- If you’ll have me back, maybe I can answer the question next year.