"In a world where political systems are increasingly gridlocked every day, and much of Silicon Valley is focused on peddling ads, the civic innovation and open data movements are a bright and optimistic exception to the zeitgeist."<p>Amen to this! I'm excited by the trend of more hackers realizing that they have the skills to fix a lot of what is broken about politics and government.
This idea has a lot more potential. Once you have the data, you can obviously give the individual user the best alternative route if there is delay on the desired one. You can also use this proactively, similar to what "Google Now" does, to alert commuters in the morning how much longer their trip might take. You could even offer functionality to automatically adjust the phone's alarm clock.<p>But you can take this even further than individual users and dynamically re-route passenger flows if enough of them are using the service. Say there is an interruption on a main commuter route, but several alternatives exist. Most people are now likely to choose the second best route. Since that route is unlikely to be able to handle the additional passengers, it will probably be jammed very quickly. However, using the RT passenger and situation data, it would be possible to find the globally optimal solution for load balancing the passenger flow. You can then provide the passengers via smartphone with individualised information regarding which route to take to implement this routing.<p>I think this has a lot of potential for taking public transport to the next level by utilising existing capacities to the fullest extent and providing benefits to all passengers.
This seems similar to is metro broke?<p><a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/is-metro-broke/id849428357?mt=8" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/is-metro-broke/id849428357?m...</a>
This could be very interesting, and could even sit in the background and track user's movements without needing an explicit action to report problems.<p>Unless you're in New York where everything is underground of course. Sadly.
Eastbound, Northbound, Southbound, Westbound?<p>I am not sure the authors have ever been to Boston. Here there is only <i>Inbound</i> and <i>Outbound</i>. I went to www.mbta.ninja and then spent about 30 seconds trying to figure out if any of the alerts are related to me.
I had a lackluster interview experience at the company the author works for and mentions. After completing a coding challenge, I got a generic:<p><pre><code> "After deliberating, we have decided not to proceed with your application."
</code></pre>
I asked for more specific feedback, from two different people, and got no response.