We won’t get past budget cuts, badly engineered italian trains and promises of hot air galore when it comes to public transportation, any time soon. There’s no money for improving the convenience factor, improve efficiency and precision, or buy more buses/hire more drivers. So how about we improve public transportation by focusing on completely different parameters ?
Imagine this
Damn it’s cold. You need to go to that seminar, but you really don’t want to spend much time being outside. It’s like hell just froze over with a vengeance. Oh that’s right, you start to remember, you don’t have to. City transport just released that new app.
You launch the app. Tell it the address you need to go to. It calculates which buses and trains you need to take, tells you the ticket price, and shows you the schedule of the first means of transportation. It’s a bus. Its icon is green, telling you it’s within +/- 1 minute of being on time. So you know you need to get there on time today. Even though the statistics show that this particular line is generally 5-10 minutes late during morning rush hours. And that some buses are even too full to bring you.
You wonder… are any of your friends going there perhaps ? A lot of your colleagues and friends are using this system as well, and you used Facebook and Twitter to import your friends list. So… let’s see. Oh, Peter seems to be going as well. So you click “I want to go on that bus !”, and the app shows you when you need to leave home, how long it takes for you to walk to the bus stop, and using the statistics of that particular line during that particular period, also asks you if you’d like to be there so you can take the bus before you had planned.
It doesn’t take long for Peter to see this on his smartphone, and he replies “You should take whatever bus comes first, buses are horribly full right now”. He even marks the bus as full. You see some of the other passengers have marked the bus as “doesn’t pick up new passengers, bus is full”. Oh right, the bus icon has turned red.
Off to the bus stop. You get there in time – the apps guidance was on point. Of course, it’s in your pocket, because brrrrr. The cold ! Suddenly the presence icon on the interactive busstop turns black. Oh no. The bus broke down ! Good thing you took the apps advice and arrived one departure early.
Suddenly your pocket vibrates. It’s your app – it received the change in the bus presence, and has calculated an alternative way of getting there, via another bus line. So you get to either choose the alternative route, or simply wait – the next bus isn’t far away.
It’s one thing to try and make make public transportation more efficient. We get that. In my short story above, I’m trying to turn things around – why should people stand there in the rain or cold, getting sick while waiting – when we have the technology to avoid it ? We can easily measure and locate with a degree of precision which is easily as good as we need it to be. Why do people have to stand there, uncertain and uninformed, when we can just as easily create a public transportation information highway ?
One of the reasons I’d rather use my bicycle or my car is that public transportation is inconvenient compared to just getting in my own car and go – when I need it to go. I don’t have any uncertainty, and the schedule says “when you want to”. I have a belief that public transportation will never be able to compete with that. So, at least compete on efficiency – and increase the awareness and information for passengers. Let people feel in control of their own transport experience.
Ms. Passenger, I presume ?
Another thing is: What if the public transportation system became social ? What if a bus was no longer just a vehicle full of individuals, but a community of connected passengers ?
It’s very easy to imagine being part of a group of passengers who spend their time on the same bus, every morning and every afternoon. They have something in common. The basic ingredients are there.
Why not let these people share the experience ? Let them message each other. Let them participate in a public stream in the context of their current bus line for example. If something happens, let them notify each other. Let them share pictures from their trips.
Who knows, those great stories you didn’t count on, may start to pop up. Mr. Passenger meets Ms. Passenger by way of the public transportation social network. My kids meet your kids in the bus, we add each other as Busbook (for lack of a better name) friends, and do coffee one day.
The transportation company can gather ideas from passengers, and passengers can vote on the ideas which they would feel were the biggest improvement to their transport experience.
If you’ve ever tried Waze on your iPhone, you’d get the idea. Waze is a social gps app. I don’t use it much for showing the way. Last year though, during our trip to Copenhagen during a snowstorm, I had it running. And I actually saw other wazers on my way there. Right there on the highway, in the queue, I saw a guy going in the other direction. I also signaled the other users that we were in a queue. Actually, the app kinda knows, as it knows what my speed should be – and measure what it actually is. And so, it figures out I’m probably in a queue, and mark that stretch of road automatically.
Genius.
I also got messages from other wazers (although I can’t really answer, as I’m driving – but how about adding voice messages to Waze ?).
I digress. My point is, when you take a “not good enough” transportation system, and add peoples tendency to just stand there alone, you get something even worse (is my assumption).
What if you enabled the passengers and created sort of a community feeling around “going on line E+ in the morning”.
What if you mashed up the trains location, with the passengers’ locations, with a Google map, and visualized all of the passengers using the transportation system right now ?
What if you visualized that people are not alone ?
What if you visualized “hey, I have a friend on that line, and a friend on that line – AWESOME !” ?
Wanna play bus ?
Another thing you could do, is to gamify public transportation. What if you could compete with other passengers on the same line ? Other passengers in your city ? Other passengers from your workplace or university ?
What if you applied sort of a “fame” status to people ? Most trips. Most transportation intel which can be used to optimize the lines. Most points.
What would happen if you added rewards to that ? Get one trip for free, at your convenience. Get a free month of transportation, if you’ve got the top score for the year.
Let passengers nominate other passengers for being great co-passengers.
Add to the public transportation experience by letting people compete, by recognizing people and by rewarding them for good behaviour and continued use.
The bus company that became a data mining company
I’ve been thinking of the whole “Waze for public transportation” idea since I started using Waze – a long time ago. But this Sunday when returning from my nephews 2nd birthday in Copenhagen (a 2h45m drive), I was listening to Jeff Jarvis‘ “What Would Google Do” audiobook, which the Danish DR radio show Harddisken gave us all because it was their birthday (you can still download WWGD until february 8th, so go get it – it’s great !).
In it, Jarvis says: Decide which business you’re in. And I agree with him.
Let’s say that e.g. a bus company is in the business of transporting people. We’ve heard over and over how hard that is. They don’t make enough money.
So let’s say the bus company is no longer just in the business of transporting people from A to B. What if it’s in the business of providing a transport experience ? Let’s say the company succeed in making their transport system social, perhaps even gamified. And let’s say they get to collect GPS data from peoples smartphones while people are on their buses.
The data they could collect from that, screams “POTENTIAL !” to me.
Not only can they use that data to measure their own line efficiency and precision.
Not only can they empower their passengers, and save them hours in the cold.
They can also potentially create a huge dataset which they can sell to advertisers, so advertisers know which ads are best placed on which lines. I’m betting that’s worth something. Advertisers don’t just get to advertise. They get to advertise the right thing, to the right people, in the right place – and depending how smart the apps and the bus stop signals are, perhaps even in the right situation.
So now the bus company is no longer a transportation company which transports passengers from A to B.
It’s a data mining company which enables people to participate in great transportation experiences, and just happen to pick up people in location A, and drop them off at location B.
Am I naive ?
Of course, all of the above is utopia at the moment – and you may sit there now and think “that guy… that fucking guy… the level of naivity in his head”.
As naive as my above vision/idea my sound, the point is this:
If you’re not able to compete well on parameter A, perhaps you should just ditch parameter A, and start competing on a whole new set of parameters. Make the business area your own. Apple did that with music players, smartphones and tablets. And I do believe they have $45 billion good reasons you should start doing that too. Incidentally, what they started out being has become just part of the mix. And that part of the mix is increasing in size due to the other part of the mix they did better than everyone else. Because nobody else dared stand out and win.
Start defining your business area, instead of just being the bland, faceless company which tries whatever everyone else does, which everyone can see isn’t working.
And in the process, enable people. Give them control of their own transportation experience. Because that’s another thing I learned from Jarvis this sunday, which I find very true this day in age:
“Give us control, and we will use it”.
So give it to us. It’s as good for you, as it is for us.
