Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Personalized transit planning for the AATA

Some notes on something that doesn't exist yet, but should.

Imagine a service that has URLs like

http://wheresmybus.org/route/5/inbound/packard+granger/3
http://wheresmybus.org/route/any/inbound/packard+state/0
http://wheresmybus.org/route/any/any/stone-school+eisenhower/4

and which has a very simple output of the times you need to leave to catch the next bus

8:04
8:22

based on the following:

real time bus location information (via mobile ridetrak), for buses already en route, and then estimated times for scheduled buses not yet visible. This is scrapable from existing services.

previously estimated, interpolated times for time points, so "packard+granger" is known to be "packard+south" plus 2 minutes. Interpolation is something that the AATA won't provide, but if you know your route you can probably get within a minute or two.

user specified time offsets to show time you spend to get to the bus stop, the "3" in the above giving me time to walk out the door and walk to the bus, but not to run.

The "any" route variant would let you simultaneously get information about next-bus routing for stops that have multiple lines serving them, and also let you go in any direction just in case you want the "anywhere but here" bus system.

In my typical use of mobile ridetrak I often do this computation in my head (oh, the bus is 8 minutes late...let's see, that means I can leave at ... or walk down how many stops?) That's a lot of math for what should be straightforward for a computer to put together, and if you crunched this down tiny enough it could fit on a very tiny screen.

Shiawassee River Paddle Event - May 18 2008 - Holly to Fenton, Michigan

Shiawassee River Paddle Event
Sunday, May 18, 2008

Start : WaterWorks Park in Holly, Michigan

End : Strom Park in Fenton, Michigan

Distance : 7 scenic miles of numerous twists and turns

Canoe Rental available with Heavners Canoe Livery

Schedule :

10:00 am : On-site registration begins WaterWorks Building, Broad Street

11:30 am : Introductory Ceremony North side WaterWorks Park

11:45 am : Experienced Canoeists Start at Millpond, Broad Street

12:15 pm : Novice/Youth Canoeists Start at Millpond, Broad Street

12:45 pm : Kayak/ Single person canoeists Start on Shiawassee River, Broad Street

** 1:15 pm : Leisure/fun paddle Start on Shiawassee River, Broad Street **

6:00 pm : Final river sweep completed

On-site availability of snacks and water.

Shuttle transport from 1pm – 6 pm for continuous transport of boats/ people

Trophies for First and Second Place in all three races.

For more info and photos, visit websites :
www.headwaterstrailsinc.org
http://shiawassee-river.blogspot.com/

Registration Forms :
http://www.headwaterstrailsinc.org/RiverRaceregistrationform2008.pdf

Questions ? Call Sue Julian, 248-634-3513.

Rain or Shine !

Detroit suburban SMART bus transit routing in Google Transit

The Detroit area SMART bus system now has routing and schedule information in Google Transit. It gives bus numbers and times for rides across the metro Detroit area, and plans the next available trips for you.

With all of this data it now looks almost possible to schedule and plan transportation from Ann Arbor to large parts of metro Detroit on public transportation. Mind you it's a little roundabout, but you have two choices:

- take Amtrak Ann Arbor - Detroit - Royal Oak - Pontiac, 3 trips/day
- take the Michigan Flyer bus to Metro Airport, switch to a SMART bus, and connect to routes from there - allow plenty of time for transfers and to find your stops.

I haven't timed the last of these, but I'm sure it's at least three hours, maybe four if you get a bad transfer time. (ouch) But it does, indeed, look possible, perhaps even interesting in an adventure travel sort of way.

Technorati Tags: maps, google-transit, bus, annarbor, neogeography

AATA proposed route changes for Fall 2008, preliminary analysis

The AATA has announced proposed changes to the schedule for this fall. New maps and schedules are not out yet, but there are descriptions of the changes. Here's a breakdown of what wins and what loses with the change.

There's more information and discussion of this on:
- Arbor Update
- Get Downtown
- Ann Arbor News
- Ann Arbor Is Overrated
links to follow when they all get around to writing about it

The short summary, I think, is that the bus system is shifting its service to improve route frequency to the west side of town, cutting service on routes that have low ridership, and shaving a trip here and there. I don't know the total number of service hours before and after (no data yet).

Notably missing from this set of changes is any kind of express bus Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti routing (the mythical 4X route), and any routing that goes directly down Maple/Stadium (the mythical "east-west connector" which could go Sky High to Arborland in one straight shot).

Who wins:
- Route 8 is every 15 minutes! The biggest win
- Route 12UM (Miller) adds service to Sky High, 15 min service on Miller Rd
- minor tweaks to the 4 to speed the journey
- one extra 4 afternoon bus as far as Arborland
- late night (10:45) Blake to Pioneer on the 7

Who loses:
- late trips on the 1U
- evening service on the 3
- latest trip Ypsi-Ann Arbor on the 5
- 12UL goes way (replaced by improved 8 service)
- mid-day 13
- mid-day 14
- summer evening, sunday 15
- 16 changes which I can't parse which probably affect shopping trips

More as I get maps.

Hotwire and Facebook Beacon

UPDATED: to make it more clear who is saying what!

0. My trip reservations (I got a great hotel deal) sent to Facebook, and noted on Flickr by Matt Hampel, with some surprise, in a post "Ed What?"

I sincerely hope that Facebook sees some righteous response about this weird privacy advertising-without-paying-us business.

1. Complaint to Hotwire, written by me.

I spoke with Tracy (employee number 1258) regarding a concern that I had that Hotwire was misusing certain data that I had an expectation of privacy on by sharing it with Facebook which in turn sent a note to 300 of my friends, one of whom asked if I was spamming them and if it was really me. I'm generally happy with Hotwire, and it's saved me a bunch of money, and I tell my friends that I use it, but the details of the interaction with Facebook and your customer service professional's insistence that I take up the problem with Facebook (with whom I have never spent any money) is disappointing. I would like an apology from Hotwire for spamming my friends, a setting in the Hotwire application to prevent it from ever happening again, and two free night's stay to compensate me for the hassle that you have put me through so far in explaining that no, I didn't spam all of them with details of where I buy my tickets.

2. From Hotwire customer service:

Dear Edward,

Thank you for contacting Hotwire regarding Facebook.

I regret the trouble you have had with Facebook.

Facebook Beacon provides advanced privacy controls so Facebook users can decide whether to distribute specific actions from participating sites with their friends. If you decide to use Facebook Beacon it means you have chosen to share your personal online usage information.

If you are logged onto your Facebook and complete a transaction on Hotwire, a pop-up window appears on the lower right corner. The pop-up presents a story about your booking.

If you do nothing or close the pop-up window, the story appears on your friends News Feed and their own Facebook homepage Mini-Feed. If you click "No Thanks" the story is not published.

Your friend sees the story and clicks on the link. For Hotwire they are taken to the vertical landing page.

Important: They do not see any information about what was purchased or personal billing information about you, the Facebook Beacon user.

For the privacy policy with Facebook go to
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php. You can also go to
privacy@facebook.com

I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this has caused.

If we can be of further assistance, please feel free to reply to this
email or contact us directly at 1-866-HOTWIRE (468-9473). Thank you for
choosing Hotwire.

Sincerely,

Valerie R
Hotwire Customer Care
www.hotwire.com

3. From Facebook customer service

Hi Edward,

Just as News Feed has always enabled you to share the actions you take on Facebook with your friends, now you can share many of the actions you take on rest of the web as well.

Facebook is now affiliated with a variety of websites to have the actions you take on their sites pulled back into Facebook and communicated to your friends through News Feed. To take advantage of this feature, you must be logged into Facebook while you interact with one of these affiliated sites. When you perform an action on an affiliated site, you have the option to have this action generate a story in your friends’ News Feed. You will always be notified and given the opportunity to opt out of having that particular story published.

As a Facebook user, you have complete control to determine your privacy settings for the actions you take on other websites. The next time you navigate to the Facebook Home page after interacting with an affiliated site, you’ll receive a second reminder that that website is about to publish a story on your behalf. Again, you can choose not to publish that particular story. You also have the option to specify whether you want that website to always publish stories, notify you before publishing stories, or never publish stories for you. As always, Facebook gives you full control of your information. You can edit your privacy at any time from the Privacy Settings for Third-Party Websites page.

Please let us know if you have any further questions or concerns regarding this new feature.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Reece
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

UPDATES:

Links on this topic (oh, there are a lot; just picking some contemporary ones):

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life / Some Thoughts on the Facebook Beacon

Recently I’ve read a number of negative posts about the Facebook Beacon which highlight how easy it is for a company to completely misjudge the privacy implications and ramifications of certain features in social software applications.

MoveOn to Facebook: We caught you red-handed

Shortly thereafter, the back-and-forth spat continued as MoveOn's Adam Green issued a response to the response. "Facebook has made zero changes in Beacon since last week--their policy remains opt-out instead of opt-in, their opt-outs remain well hidden, and if someone does jump through the hoops of opting out it only applies to purchases made on one external web site instead of all sites," Green's statement read. "Why did Facebook pro-actively make it harder for Facebook users to protect their privacy by eliminating the global opt-out feature days before Beacon's launch?"

MORE UPDATES:

41 sites using Facebook Beacon

Below is the full list and, when available, what information the websites send to Facebook. The one entry I found the most interesting was the one for Redlight. As I mention below, I couldn't find any site that went by that name that wasn't an adult site. Maybe the same people who share their porn viewing are the ones who are interested in Random Play?

Technorati Tags: beacon, facebook, giant-global-graph, hotwire, spam, travel

Picking a hotel with Hotwire and the help of the net

I'm about to do some travel, and I don't really care precisely where I stay as long as it's reasonable; here's some notes on that process.

When you go to get a hotel on Hotwire, it doesn't tell you exactly which property you're going to stay at. That's mostly OK except when the hotel inventory includes some stinker places you'd really rather never go to again. Here's one part of how to figure out what they're selling you.

Better Bidding is a forum for Priceline and Hotwire users to exchange information about which hotel they're getting when they bit through those services. The Better Bidding Pittsburgh page lists star ratings, locations, and amenities of featured sites, plus for Priceline how much people paid.

To look at general hotel reviews, one source is Tripadvisor. The Tripadvisor Pittsburgh page gives lists of what things other travelers (or perhaps paid shills, who can tell) have said about places. You can't trust any individual review any more than any random Amazon review, but in the aggregate they're a good display of alternatives.

I have yet to find a travel site that does good pricing and availability for travel along a route, the question we run into every year where we want a room somewhere between the Bridge and West Branch that's nice and pretty cheap. If you know where you're going to stay, and it's a big city, and you're willing to dig a little, there are some deals.

AATA Route 5 student move-in detour details

The AATA's #5 route is detoured during student move-in. When I rode the bus yesterday, a number of people were visibly upset at bus stops because their bus had not come for an hour. Today's bus took a different detour than yesterday's. I plotted everything I could find, and marked the nearest good stop that was reachable by all of the various detour routes that are plausible.

This contradicts the posted information, which says

Route 5 Packard To Ann Arbor: Regular route on Packard to State to William to Fourth to the Blake Transit Center. There will be no service on Thompson Street.

To Ypsilanti or Meijer: Regular route from the Blake Transit Center to William and Thompson, continuing on William to State to Packard to resume regular route. There will be no service on Thompson Street.

I don't know if the Packard detour was a planned detour from the detour (traffic was mighty bad) or a rogue driver, but I can easily imagine first-time new transit riders being angry and upset.

UPDATE:

Dear Edward Vielmetti:

That was an error on our part and we apologize for the mistake.

Sincerely,
The Ann Arbor Transportation Authority

View Larger Map

Technorati Tags: 48104, 48109, aata, annarbor, bus, detour, map, neogeography, theride

Figure eight school bus derby in Flat Rock, June 16 2007

School is out so it's time for school bus racing at the Flat Rock Speedway!

Saturday, June 16 at Flat Rock Speedway features the wildly-popular Marco's Pizza School Bus Figure 8 races! Picture 8 school buses racing on the Figure 8 track.....fender-banging, door-banging action and the occasional flip of a bus as it enters one of the turns. We'll throw in the Toledo ARCA A-1 Auto Parts Factory Stocks and the Michigan Legends Cars for a great night of entertainment! Reserved seating is just $16 per seat and can be obtained in advance by calling the track at 734-782-2480. ALL general admission tickets (approximately a total of 3000) go on sale the day of the race at 4 p.m. when the front gate and ticket office opens. Racing begins at 7 p.m.

Video of this event!

Here's a photo from Jose of the fun a couple of years ago watching school buses flip over and smash into each other.

Flat Rock is down river south of the airport.

To give you some idea of what this is all about, here's a clip from a race at the Rockford Speedway:

Technorati Tags: crazy, figure-eight, flatrock, racing, schoolbus, schools-out-for-the-summer

Avoiding US-23 on the trip from Ann Arbor to Lansing

This morning's trip to Lansing went via back roads - I-94 to Chelsea, then M-52 north through Stockbridge and back to I-96 at Webberville. It avoided the vast tie-ups with north-of-Ann Arbor construction traffic.

The other route that is reasonable to Lansing is I-94 to Jackson, then US-127 north; it's a bit longer, but freeways all the way.

UPDATE: No maps yet, but here are some suggestions and more details on alternate routes.

Rather than I-94 to Chelsea, you can take the back roads there. Huron River Drive to Dexter-Chelsea Road is a nice slow way, or going a bit further north you can take North Territorial over and pick up M-52 just north of town.

Jeff Lopez-Stuit notes: "There's another fun route from north territorial - hadley road north through unadilla, and then west on doyle rd until you get to stockbridge, then m-52 north".

Upper Peninsula U-Pick blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, cranberry farm directory

Some part of the berry picking experience involves knowing which wild patch of land has berries this year and this week. Blueberries grow wild on the jack pine plains of Marquette County, tiny sweet berries that depend on good rain and good sun to ripen their best.

If you want to leave a little bit less to chance, or if you want strawberries or cranberries or blueberries in some quantity hard to get in the wild, here's some pointers to lists of berry farms in the Upper Peninsula.

Upper Peninsula Pick Your Own is a directory of "pick your own" farms in the UP; the rest of the site has listings worldwide. My favorite listing from there is for a place in Dollar Bay:

"Fresh blueberries" in Dollar Bay - Blueberries...and lots of them.
Upper Point Mills Road, in Dollar Bay, MI 49922. There's no phone or email, because it is an honor system pick-your-own at someone's house. A visitor wrote this: [...]

The farm opens for picking usually in late July or early August and runs until the crop dies. It's a fairly small farm located at someone's house, but not many people know of it, so there are always TONS of berries. You pick your own, and then weigh your berries on the scale that is there. You pay like a dollar per pound of berries. You have to bring your own dish to pick with. No one is there to supervise...its a do-it-yourself farm :) You can go at any time you like. The people who own the farm also have chickens and horses to look at.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture has a u-pick list too, but the coverage in the UP is very thin - they only list one place in Carney:

Jasper's Sugar Bush
Carney, MI -- Menominee County
REGION: 1
Phone: 800-646-2753
Email: jasper@dreamscp.com

Description:
We produce and retail a delicious variety of maple products including maple syrup, candy cream and sugar. Visit our farm or website. We ship anywhere.

Driving Directions:
7 miles E of US41; Carney on County Road 374
Hours of Operation:

Open all year.

It's still worth a look at the Michigan official one for its Michigan farmers market list - while it doesn't have every roadside truck full of corn, it does have dozens of regularly scheduled farm markets around the state (3 pages full).