TransportationCamp San Francisco Style

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Frank Hebbert:  [00:11] So we’re here in San Francisco for Transportation Camp West.  We’re here for two days.  We’ve brought together a couple of hundred transportation enthusiasts, advocates, tech people, city officials, to talk about transportation and technology.  It’s an unconference, so people propose sessions that they’d like to lead, or they’d like to see a discussion around. 

Emily Peckenham:  [00:33] I was just working on a session called Public/Private Partnership for Liveable Streets.  We looked at different ways that the public and private sector can collaborate.  And also what some of the challenges were, such as environmental standards and regulations that can prevent change and how policy is very slow to evolve. 

Tim Papandreou:  [00:48] Our session just right now is on peer to peer car sharing, which is basically growing the existing car sharing model and really connecting neighbours with neighbours.  One of the big things was how do we get this message out to people, how do we get people connected, and then how do we get around some of the issues of insurance, keeping the cars clean, being a good neighbour.

Damien Newton:  [01:07] A couple of us made the trip up from Los Angeles, and it’s been really interesting as we go into these different sessions.  I mean you know Los Angeles and San Francisco are really different places, but when you talk about them now and you talk about them in the conference, San Francisco faces a lot of the same challenges Los Angeles faces, just everything’s just sort of in different degrees and different varieties of issues.

Jennifer Pahlka:  [01:28] Right now in government pretty much each municipality or agency or whatever jurisdiction it is, is solving their technology problems individually.  So they’re building or buying a solution to their problems but, for instance, at the local level there’s 18,000 municipalities in the country.  They could be building at once and then sharing it amongst all those municipalities.  So not only would that save the taxpayers an enormous amount of money, but they’d also be able to learn from each other about how to use the software best and share the learnings about the mistakes that they’ve made, or great ways they’ve used technology to make life better for citizens.

Melissa Jordan:  [02:05] I just… I helped co-lead a session on using social media to engage customers in public transportation.

Jake Avidon:  [02:13] The name of the session was Clipper, Love it or Hate it, and I was very excited to come to the event today to meet with people in the industry to get their feedback about their experiences with the Clipper Programme, and in particular how Clipper has met their expectations or not met their expectations.  And so today’s ideas were terrific in nurturing some thinking for me that I’ll bring back to our office and work on as we consider next year’s budget. 

Chris Smith:  [02:40] We just had a great session here at Transportation Camp West.  We had some software developers, my co-developer in the project, Matt Conway was able to join us, first time I met him in person, we’ve been developing for several months together and Transportation Camp West was our first opportunity to meet face to face. 

Jay Nath:  [02:53] I’ve already got half a dozen ideas that I want to follow up with people on.

Speaker:  [02:57] We’re seeing conversations where people can go back to their desks tomorrow and start working on something new that’s going to help these people that they met this weekend. 

Tim Papandreou:  [03:05] Go Transportation Camp.   

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