About

TransitCamp is inspired by BarCamp. Bar Camp events are powered by participation and collaboration. TransitCampBayArea will highlight the public transit system in the Bay Area Region and will bring together transit officials and citizens to discuss stuff like: getting schedules on the go, the future of the Bay Area transit system, experiences and observations (not complaints, though), the websites, cool ideas for attracting more riders, etc.

Our focus is on encouraging more people to use public transit. Certainly that doesn't exclude infrastructure, but I don't think a bunch of web geeks should be focusing on that. We discussed the following three areas in which the '2.0' crowd can contribute to the conversation:

• technology
• culture
• education

Technology is in reference to the delivery of the basic data that people need to get to know how to get from Point A to Point B on transit. Good routes, personalized routes, fast routes, simple routes...with great interfaces. That sort of thing as an example.

Culture includes talking about the culture of community, openness and collaboration that we benefit from in the 2.0 space as well as finding ways to shift the view of transit as a 'poor people's transportation' to celebrating it as a cleaner, greener, more fun way to travel from point A to Point B. New York has an iconic system (and it was iconic even before infrastructure was added) as does Toronto, London, Paris, Berlin and many other european cities. I personally loved the project that was launched in Toronto around the buttons representing the stations. For those of you who have been to Toronto, each station represents an 'era' pretty much with golden tiling in the station built in the 60's, grey and baby blue tiling in the 80's stations, etc. The buttons are fantastic for celebrating that history.

Education was a topic that Margaret brought up as really effective in the past and there are loads of cool wiki projects as well as tools built by citizens that have gone a long way to getting people to use transit. I think we can be really creative on that front.

With these simple topics of conversation, I think we can go a long way.

The event will be well-documented in the form of blog posts, wiki content, photos, and video for everyone who is unable to attend. (Please use the tag: transitcampbayarea)