(The following appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on July 23.)
BALTIMORE — As high gas prices drive more commuters to try public transit, riders are discovering (or rediscovering) the joys of waiting on the platform as the minutes tick by, wondering what’s keeping their train.
Now, the digitally connected in the Baltimore-Washington corridor have a new way to keep track of whether their train is on track. It’s called Clever Commute, an independent, “crowdsourced” (aka grassroots) network in which transit riders provide each other real-time alerts of delays and cancellations via e-mails and text-messaging.
Begun two years ago among a handful of New Jersey commuters, Clever Commute has grown to include thousands of transit riders in the New York area and has spread to Boston and Portland, Oregon – among the most transit-oriented cities in the country. The network is branching out now to Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and recently dipped its toe into the Baltimore-Washington area.
It’s the brainchild of Josh Crandall, a 43-year-old IT specialist from Montclair, NJ, who says he got the idea one day while wondering where his train was. He initially enlisted a half-dozen buddies who regularly rode the same line. Since then, he said, it’s grown like topsy.
“There was a spider-web effect. It just kind of fanned out,” he said, to include more and more riders, jumping to other lines and then other communities.
Growing it may be, but Crandall still has his day job. Clever Commute is a sidelight for now, free to subscribers – though he hopes to be able to find other ways of marketing the transit updates. He recently partnered with Baristanet.com, a pioneering New Jersey “placeblog” (i.e., a hyperlocal news Web site) to provide real-time updates on its Web site of the New Jersey rail and bus lines serving the community. Perhaps it’s a model for other electronic newspapers.
Today’s “Train Alerts” on Baristanet.com carried no major disruptions, just a report of a lost wallet, according to Debbie Galant, the site’s editor and co-owner (and, personal disclosure, a friend from college days).
“During regular days, if there’s nothing big, it’s kinda ho hum,” Galant said. “But if there’s a transit strike, or bad weather,” she added, or a crisis, such as a crime or a natural or manmade disaster, that’s when the service really shines. “Anything like that, you would have people instantly knowing about it.”
Of course here, the Maryland Transit Administration Web site already reports any disruptions to MARC, commuter bus, light rail, subway, local bus and mobility services. MTA even offers email bulletins and updates, tailored to the servces you use and the dates you use them.
Crandall says he encourages commuters to subscribe to any update services provided by their transit agencies. But transit agencies are sometimes slow to report outages, or to give the real skinny for them. Clever Commute, he adds, provides an independent, “person-to-person” communication about what’s happening on the trains and buses – and even on the way to them.
Clever Commute’s Baltimore-Washington network is brand new, and awfully quiet so far. Are the Penn and Camden lines always on time?