[edgyswingset]

The article says:

> Imagine if every bus, boat, and train in London was kitted out with sensors and counters, with the data made available to third-party service providers — this could help cities manage transport infrastructure far more effectively.

And my reaction is, "Imagine if we had more buses and investment in public infrastructure to begin with."

In fairness, public infrastructure is already miles better in London than most U.S. cities. So the idea of tricked out buses with good smartphone integration seems a lot more realistic to me than if this were done in the U.S.

[calpaterson]

>> Imagine if every bus, boat, and train in London was kitted out with sensors and counters, with the data made available to third-party service providers — this could help cities manage transport infrastructure far more effectively.

> And my reaction is, "Imagine if we had more buses and investment in public infrastructure to begin with."

Well in London all the bus and train data is made available to third-party service providers. That is how citymapper exists

[squeaky-clean]

I think they meant it more along the lines of "I'd rather have my bus be on time than have my smartphone tell me exactly how late it will be."

[DINKDINK]

Good luck with on-time buses in London traffic.

[corobo]

Having said that they're frequent enough if you're an out-of-towner they feel like they're running perfectly on time.

If a bus is late where I'm from it just vanishes - you can be watching Arriva's live map and its route blip will just disappear, enjoy waiting for the next one (minimum half hour wait, repeat if that one's running late too)

[pjc50]

It's also miles better than most UK cities, which is occasionally a sore point. The rest of the country has to put up with Stagecoach buses which are less reliable at twice the price.

(Except Edinburgh, which also has publicly funded cheap buses)

[dazc]

London is an exception indeed. In most other cities it's a free for all between two or three companies, each with their own very poorly developed payment systems with little or no connectivity between them.

[corobo]

and in most towns it's a monopoly. Don't want to pay £4.20 to get into town and back? Walk.

[peteretep]

    > In fairness, public infrastructure is
    > already miles better in London than most
    > U.S. cities

Just most?

[awjr]

I did some work using Census 2011 data and created league tables for modes of transport across England and Wales. 56% of London residents commute to work by public transport. Next highest is Manchester at 31%. Unsure where that stands within an international league. I'd assume Tokyo would be higher. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U9f-g8ETvljw-YAZbFpW...

[clappski]

With another ~15% for cycling/walking for London, it's an amazingly easy city to get around with transport options that stretch out far from the city itself (I travel 50 miles each way, taking 1hr15m when everything is working correctly).

[awjr]

I think the more interesting work I did was around the 20 min walk/20min cycle and the numbers of people still driving those distances. In London 164,079 within 20 minute walk, 584,749 within 20 minute cycle out of a total of 1,097,173 people that drive.

I'm in the process of writing this up but the implication is that we could get a large reduction in congestion and traffic pollution through building a good cycle network.

More interestingly we should probably move to a road charging system that dispraportionatly charges high for short car journeys.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nDCkK0LvkxqHLeYfd6wS...

Full set of spreadsheets: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4YARJgso6IxRjd1ZlNDZklGaX...

[cel1ne]

Here in Vienna/Austria 73% commute to work by public transport, walking and bicycle.

[codingmyway]

London underground trains are fitted with sensors that can tell the weight of each carriage and there's a good chance that the data will be available via Transport For London's API, if it isn't already (I worked on the API two years ago)

City mapper has their own data sources but a lot is still from the public API that TFL provides for free with the reasoning that app developers will do a better job than TFL could.