Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Seattle Hacktivists Develop New Apps to Fight Traffic Congestion

Two weekends ago, 70 web developers and engineers, designers, data analysts, transportation advocates, traffic engineers, and bureaucrats got together for an event called Hack the Commute. The objective: Take public and private transportation data and create or improve apps and produce data analysis and visualizations that make it easier to travel in Seattle.

The city consistently ranks in the top 10 worst U.S. cities for gridlock. Funding to fight it is very limited and the terrain limits options to expand transportation facilities.

Instead, the city is looking to use technology. Some of the projects that were worked on included finding better bike-share routes, apps to help decide what mode to use based on parking availability, and more.

After two days of furious coding and testing and tweaking, each team had five minutes to pitch their product to a panel of judges. Three finalists were chosen. http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/seattle-transportation-apps-hack-the-commute-event
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About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.