• cell phone and spread spectrum technology, i.e. cellphones and wireless PDAs,
• breakthrus in mapping, routing and GIS,
• smart card technology, and
• private sector efficiency over government administration.

The transit system should request proposals on six projects:

1. Central routing computer sufficiently powerful to maintain complete map of the service area, including
   
   a.  precise location, capacity, and route of every transit vehicle, and
   
   b.  precise location and destination requirement, of every individual rider (including pedestrians in motion, to pickup locations).
   
   
2. Wireless data communication system capable of highly reliable connection to the projected population of vehicles and customers, covering every nook and cranny of the service area, and capable of determining the location of the caller.
   
   
3. Manufacture of large numbers of PDAs such as wireless Palm Pilot, capable of graphical presentation of maps, and a stylus for pointing to destinations, routes etc. 
   
   
4. Manufacture of terminals for installation into cars, jitneys, buses, etc. probably based on a Laptop computer, capable of very good graphical presentation of maps, with the same pointing capabilities for routes and destinations, etc.
   
   The operator of a bus or jitney needs the following things:
   
   a.  Map display indicates where I am, and where I'm going,
   
   b.  Pen or Stylus mechanism to transmit my route and location to the routing computer.
   
   c.  Accurate clock, synched with the central routing computer,
   
   d.  Loudspeaker or earpiece, to listen to instructions from the routing computer, and
   
   e.  mechanism for collecting money from the Rider's PDA such as an IRDA port, 802.11 LAN, bluetooth or whatever.  Paypal or other lightweight money protocol
   
   
5. Design of a conventional website for Riders to input and configure their preferences, including recurring pickup points, destinations, schedules, payment mechanisms etc.
   
   
6. Design of another conventional website for Jitneys, private taxis, bus operators and anybody else to create profiles as providers of transportation services, manage their payments and balances, etc.

You're going to see 3 or 4 jitneys feeding the major bus lines. Just give ordinary individuals a chance to play, and provide some minor subsidy to jitneys.  Jitneys will be everywhere. 

Jitneys would have to be able to issue Bus transfer tickets to the riders, and conversely, they would have to honor Bus transfer tickets coming off the buses, and be able to redeem these transfer tickets for real money. 

The taxi industry would have to be integrated into this new scheme (a taxi would have to become identical to a jitney. You have to merge the two systems. No 2-tier licensing.)   Nobody allowed to do transportation, anymore, unless they are willing to pickup Radio Transit passengers.  No more Limo service for the rich

This new industry would be a horribly expensive failure unless there are systematic, economic gains someplace, unprecedented in any transit system in the past. I am claiming that the limiting factor in mass transit has always been *information*. Mass transit has been very dumb. It weighs 30 tons and drives fixed routes, every 30 minutes. This must end.

With modern data communication, any transit system can dynamically adjust to riders needs, to reduce the waste of riders time:

a. Pickup

- closer to their point of origin
- with less elapsed time waiting.

b. Transit time

- better utilize express buses such as Sound Transit
- less time wasted at transfers
- achieve more direct routes overall

c. Dropoff

- closer to their real destination

D. Rider productivity or activities

- you have built a wireless data service. telephones, internet data services, etc. including feeds for passengers' laptops for email, news, entertainment, headphone jacks.... 

Let's get back to the "pocket pager device". Actually what is needed is something like a radio-equipped palm pilot costing $200-300. 

a. some built-in maps and schedules for all the basic routes.

b. a generic web browser letting people actually do email or web, on route or even serving as their main computer. 

c. smart card reader. Smart cards enable 100% military-grade security and identification. Your card and pin number, and the jitney's identity, would identify both parties, times and places with total certainty. No cash, no more taxi robberies or risks whatsoever, for any parties.

(ok so far, the above is going to be a common appliance in coming years -transit companies can bet on that. Why not support and accelerate the movement by building a radio transit dream combined with private wireless providers' rollout of internet services? Makes the device much more valuable.)

d. radio features: accessible by metricom or other radio network You walk out the door of anyplace in the district. Push a button on your PalmPilot. It KNOWS where you are. You zoom with the buttons to the destination. The Map is in memory. You point where you want to go and press SUBMIT. 

Two seconds later the screen says "WALK EAST ON 166TH. A GREEN JITNEY NUMBER 7399 WILL PICK YOU UP BY THE TIME YOU GET TO AURORA. IF NOT, STOP ON AURORA AND WAIT. PRESS OK TO ACCEPT THE 50 cent CHARGE...."

People would of course, press the jitney button everytime they walk out of the house since your jitney fare would include a transfer ticket to a public bus. Government would manage the number of jitneys by keeping the jitney's share of the fare low.

A lot of ordinary commuters would buy a jitney terminal for their car, to collect a few bucks everyday on the commute to work.  When I drive, I will turn on my jitney terminal.  By the time I get out of the driveway the routing computer will know where I'm going. I will pick up a couple of people on the way. I will decline pickups that are not on my route.  I will get paid $2.00 and might even enjoy some conversation.

Such a jitney industry could quickly gut more than half the ridership from the existing state-run bus system, because it would be so much more flexible and responsive. People might go from end to end, by jitney. The jitneys could interconnect and exchange passengers anyplace. The routing computer would notice a bulge of people and command a dropoff and pickup operation in some parking lot-- this is Dynamic Routing. 

People who have a User Profile on the server could immediately use cellphones... they would dial 555-5555 and press pound for a pickup.

The routing computer would say "tough luck charlie, jitneys are scarce today, start walking up 128th avenue. A yellow Subaru will pick you up around 87th street. Press STAR to agree and debit your account fifty cents."

This would cause a financial crisis in the transit district unless the busses restructure and add value on backbone services. Now, we are going to find out whether buses really do, permanently, inescapably suck, compared to cars and jitneys.

All transit districts should do this project immediately, starting with providing a common technology backbone for access by riders, jitneys and their own rolling stock. When *all* jitneys and buses know where *all* the riders are, and where the other vehicles are located, this could achieve astonishing levels of performance. For example, if a bus were 1 minute late to a transfer point, the other bus might wait. But only if there were a rider who needed to transfer, from the "late" bus. This is the sort of thing the airlines do at their major hubs.