Sao Paulo begins technology-driven plan to improve the transport system

The Government of the city of Sao Paulo will use open data and a multitude of technicians trained to try and improve its precarious public transport network.

São Paulo metro network is small, but efficient with only 74km of track compared to 337 miles of track in New York City. As a result, the roads are filled with bus - and owned by auto in Brazil rose 32 per cent to 7.4 million during the last decade, which partly explains why Sao Paulo often is nicknamed "the city of 19 million traffic jams".

To try to address these issues of acute urban mobility, the Mayor will be promoting a hackathon this weekend (26 and 27 October) for developing applications focused on the provision of public transport in São Paulo.

Participants will follow a list of requests and needs of the users of public transport that have been identified by the Government; criteria include creativity and technical quality of applications created with the weekend. There will be prizes in money of 8,000 reais ($3.674), 4,000 reais ($1.837) and R $ 3,000 ($1.377) for the three best proposals.

Applications will be created using the data made available by SPTrans, Sao Paulo's public transportation authority, since last week. This is significant because until now, Google has only had access to that information, which includes routes of buses, timetables and positioning in real time of the bus.

Any user, Brazilian or foreigner, can register to use the data after accepting a simple set of guidelines that can be found here.

My own idea - crowdsourcing bus maps in Sao Paulo

More stops in Sao Paulo are simple shelters or wooden posts only with no information about the itineraries or timetables. With this in mind, I have tried to introduce the idea of crowdsourcing a visual representation of itineraries through the design of London bus maps - commonly known as"spider".

The idea was presented to the management Gilberto Kassab exactly two years ago and I have worked on that for almost six months. The plan was to get a company ready to assemble a map with various social features free construction system, so the citizens of São Paulo use blocks lego-estilo based in London spider maps, to create a map of bus routes, add points of interest in the surroundings, construction to measure routes according to interest and so on. The introduced information could be edited by other users, Wikipedia-style.

These maps would then be available online as well as physical maps available at the bus stops. As well as getting that crowdsourcing the access to information, will be the reward for citizens see credits on maps, as designers and publishers who obtain credits.

In our plan, the company supplies the construction of map system you would get some kind of printed maps of marketing support, but real carrot was the celebrity to run a major civic project that could later be referenced.

My husband and I then requested permission from Transport for London, the transportation authority in London to use the design of the map, which was given free of charge to Sao Paulo and Mayor Boris Johnson thought that the collaboration was a great idea, so we thought that we had enough backing to get an idea of the Earth.

A typical bus stop in Sao Paulo. Photo credit: Mark Hillary (cc)

After presenting the idea, we had several meetings with the Government of the city of São Paulo, transportation body the SPTrans city and the British Consulate, who represented the Mayor of London in the debates.

While the body transport marketing thought it would be a perfect way to change the perceptions of people in the administration of public transport, empowering management of SPTrans talked about the complexity of system in Sao Paulo - 10 million more trips bus every day, several individual transport routes thousand routes change frequently...

At the beginning of 2012, we give up on the project when it became clear that some of these actors would not allow that we proceed. We ask three things:

1. Information about routes of bus, route numbers and so on. This was something that was provided to Google, with people of SPTrans almost exclusively dedicated to this task, on a weekly basis;

2 Agreement forward and to launch a tender to find a company willing to build and organize the system - the RFI we have submitted (in Portuguese) can be found here;

3. Marketing of the initiative through the channels of communications from the public transport network, so that people interested in helping.

At the time, it seemed impossible to get detailed to release the same data were providing to Google, due to "security issues". Then made one last attempt to save the work which had made during those six months and suggested that for all open data bus and promote a hackathon among high schoolers at State technical schools. We have all heard from the marketing department at that time was that the team was not willing to help.

Interestingly, in all these meetings with government officials, the recurring question was: "What is in it for you?". They could not believe that my husband and I would devote time, contacts and experience without any monetary compensation.

The answer has always been that since got the idea about the intent it was to help city - and not only the owners of internet-based smartphones, but all bus users, print maps of crowdsourcing can be used anywhere in Sao Paulo.

So the efforts of the new administration for public transport open data and engage citizens were good news to hear, despite my previous experience. Now, no one will be able to create something valuable for everyone without endless meetings, internal policy and bureaucracy. And that is real progress.