Ordnance Survey GeoVation Challenge

From my work for Suffolk ACRE and my volunteering with Halesworth Area Community Transport, I have discovered how difficult it is to model and test new ideas about local transport provision. For instance, if you wanted to  change a bus timetable to be more convenient for Halesworth (or to save councils some money) you may well be messing things up for people in Kessingland and Aldeburgh. You might try to lobby your councillor to subsidise a service and be told there’s no demand for it, or it doesn’t fit in their budget, and you will find it’s very hard to get substantive data to make your case.

What’s person to do?  If only you had a virtual bus and train set; you could model how and where your public transport goes (and work out its cost) with the real schedules and see new ideas in action without spending many nights painfully typing timetables into spreadsheets, as I have done, because there’s no tool for this yet, though there’s lots of mapping and transport simulation software that could be tied together to make one.

For some time I have been thinking of ways to get this done but only heard yesterday that there is a competition that could cover the cost of making this idea a reality.

So please can you vote for my idea that can empower communities to plan transport timetables themselves in the Ordnance SurveyGeoVation Challenge. Would you do this ASAP as it closes on March 28^th.

It’s a competition for funding to build a website application that will display current bus, train and other public transport schedules from which users can visualise current routes and schedules and also enter proposed routes and timetables to see potential connections with other modes and the impact of amendments or new provision of services.

https://challenge.geovation.org.uk/a/dtd/108489-16422

It seems you have to register with the button at the top to vote.

I’ve spoken to software engineers who are working on things like this already. You’ve seen their stuff in the news and they tell me it can be done.

Don’t let the powers that be simply tell you the public transport your community needs can’t be provided. If public transport planning can be made truly collaborative; villages, towns and parishes won’t be pitted against each other for scraps from the providers table – in ignorance of each other’s needs - nor have to pay for transport subsidies with political patronage, but will be able devise services for themselves in all modes that can best serve them from the resources of commercial, statutory or charitable organisations.

I do this with my personal remit but through my work there would be a network of testers and potential users that could rapidly put this into national use.