One App to Rule Them All
Or at least San Francisco Bay Area transportation
June 2016
As San Francisco moves forward with its innovative plans to improve public transit, reduce reliance on private cars, and reduce congestion, we should seek to provide Bay Area residents and visitors with a simple tool to improve their ability to make transportation decisions that are efficient, cost-effective and less stressful. Most people want to do the right thing — to take public transit if they can, to avoid traffic, to help the environment — but it’s not easy when you don’t know exactly what your options are, how long they will take on any given day or what they will cost. When the information is fragmented on different sites and apps, it is difficult to piece together all the possible options.
We could solve that problem with one app that combines all forms and modes of transportation in the Bay Area, from private to public, and tells you the most efficient way to get from Point A to Point B at any particular time, to and from any of the Bay Area counties or within the City. The app could include all transit systems from ferries, to buses, to light rail, to cable cars, to trains, and also include traffic on the roads, parking garage data and bike share programs, pulling together the many different apps that are available today and adding more services. It could pull real time data from each transit service using sensors on buses and trains so it would know not just the transit schedules but the actual real time information on when buses or trains will arrive, or when they are late or delays have occurred on any system. To use the app, you could enter the start and end points for your trip, how many people in your party, and whether you have a private car available. Perhaps optionally users could add the purpose of their trip (work, ballgame, dinner in SF) to help policymakers and transit providers understand the nature of traffic flows. The app could give you, say, three options for how to get there — fastest, cheapest and most scenic — combining real time data from all the transit services, as well as road traffic info from Waze and parking information if relevant to where you’re going.
For each suggested option, the app could show a time estimate for each leg of the trip, and in total, and also a cost estimate for your party. It could take into account any service disruptions or delays, which might affect your decision making. If you knew ahead of time that the Muni bus option would take an extra 30 minutes because of a service delay, you might pay a little more and take Lyft. But if you knew the Muni bus would arrive soon, you would feel more confident waiting for it. This transparency would permit more people to use public transit options, and combinations of public transit and ride share options, with a better experience, knowing the time and money involved for each route chosen before they start. If you’re not in a hurry, you can take the cheapest route; if you’re late for work and need the fastest route, you can see that as well. The app could also show a driving option, if you have a car, and tell you the time involved, the parking availability and cost, and the amount of traffic, which could show you whether a combination of public transit or rideshare options would be better.
This app could also allow you to pay for any transit option with your phone through the app, similar to use of the Muni app and some monthly transit and parking passes today. Perhaps in the future if private vehicles are charged on the roadways it could also log those charges. Prepaid cards that work on all services could be available for purchase to serve a similar function for those without smartphones or credit cards. To the extent transit subsidies are provided through employers, or are made available for low income riders, those could be applied as credits through the app or a prepaid card. Today, occasional users of public transit in the City often need to use not only cash but exact change. If there were one app that combined all the possible modes of transportation, then even occasional users and tourists could easily participate. Visitors to the City would just need to download one app to get the best experience to find their way from the hotel to the ballpark or Fisherman’s Wharf, and they wouldn’t need to fumble with cash on the cable car or bus.
In exchange for providing data into the app, each transit service or private rideshare/map/traffic/parking service could get access to all the data on an anonymized basis. This data could allow all the transit services to see which routes make the most sense at which times and add or subtract routes that are heavily used or not used at all. Muni might choose to eliminate a route at a particular hour and instead the app could offer a credit for riders using Lyft or Uber from that neighborhood at that time. The data might also show new routes that should be created or ways to sync the arrival of a bus with train or ferry departures to make certain overall travel plans more efficient. The fare data collected in the app could show which routes make and lose money, and services could adjust pricing dynamically if appropriate.
As we move forward into an age of autonomous, connected and electric vehicles, and continue with ridesharing services and other shared use of vehicles, bikes and new modes of transport, it will be even more important to use sensors and other data gathering tools to manage our resources effectively. Let’s get behind the City’s efforts to build the right infrastructure now to plan for this future, and let’s enable the consumer-facing tools that will help everyone make the right choices and improve quality of life in the Bay Area.
