Bob Firth, Informing Design
"The Long Squiggly Line That's Killing Our Transit System and an Information Science Solution"
February 21, 2007, 3:30 pm
Room 501, 135 N. Bellefield Ave
School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
The recent proposed cuts to funding of the Pittsburgh Authority Transit system have led Bob Firth and his company, Informing Design, to consider a radical redesign of bus routes based on efficient transportation systems that are being used in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Cleveland and even Curitiba, Brazil. In this talk, Bob Firth will present his ideas for developing a cost-effective and efficient bus system, based on years of experience in studying transportation flows in Pittsburgh and applying basic information science principles to solving problems of navigation and wayfinding.
Bob Firth is founder and president of Informing Design, which is an innovative company that has designed a number of novel wayfinding tools including the colorful Pittsburgh Wayfinder signs and the www.bigburg.com collection of print-on-demand maps. The talk is sponsored by the Spatial Information Science Research Interest Group of the School of Information Sciences and will be followed by a reception in Room 522.
Funky Dung
Comments 2
Pittsburgh has only moderate population density and doesn't have an aggressively planned street system.
It's easy for New York City to know that it should put buses along second avenue, it's not so self-evident where buses in Pittsburgh should go.
It seems like a problem very well suited to computer analysis.
My brother would certainly propose a machine learning algorithm of some kind
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Posted 20 Feb 2007 at 4:40 pm ¶Should poll the wokers at large companies that are not downtown. Take their zip codes, plot them on a map, and then run bus routes from the densest clusters to work.
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Posted 21 Feb 2007 at 12:16 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 2
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