Building a Smart City Economy and Information Ecosystem to Motivate Pro-Social Transportation Behavior
If you find yourself in a transportation jam, screens scattered through Oakland could help you find a way out soon. The Oakland Business Improvement District is teaming up with a few other non-profits to provide large screens showing real-time transportation options.
They’ve been installed at the University of Pittsburgh’s Sennott Square, the SkyVue Apartments, UPMC’s Falk Medical Clinic and Presbyterian and Montefiore Hospitals.
Read more: WESA fm article by Mark Nootbaar
TransitScreens providing real-time information on multimodal public transportation to Oakland commuters have been set up in the lobbies of five area buildings. The pilot project, funded by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, was announced by Pitt and the Oakland Business Improvement District.
Pittsburgh’s first publicly accessible multimodal transit screens aim to provide the public with current transportation data while attracting people to Oakland’s food and retail establishments. The screens have been installed at SkyVue Apartments, Sennott Square, Falk Clinic, UPMC Montefiore and UPMC Presbyterian hospitals.
Read more: University Times article
For Ryan Bourque, development manager at the SkyVue Apartments on Forbes Avenue in Oakland, this is a regular scene as he works in the lobby: Residents who have called Uber for a ride gather in the lobby, track their ride on a screen behind a welcoming desk in the lobby and head outside when their ride is nearby.
They are using TransitScreen, a service that provides real-time information on a variety of transit services in Oakland, including buses operated by the Port Authority, University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft, car-sharing service Zipcar and Pittsburgh’s bike-sharing program.
Read more: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article by Ed Blazina
PITTSBURGH – The Oakland Business Improvement District—in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh—is announcing the installation of TransitScreens in major Oakland property lobbies providing real-time information on multimodal public transportation to the thousands of daily Oakland commuters. This pilot project was funded by the University of Pittsburgh Office of the Vice-Provost for Research.
Read more: Oakland Business Improvement District press release
A new PittSmartLiving display went live today, at the Sennott Square Building, home of the Department of Computer Science, making it the first such display in an academic building in Pittsburgh.
The display can be accessed at http://tsgo.io/sennottsquare (even from your mobile phone) and provides location-specific real-time information about:
Our first PittSmartLiving displays that show location-specific real-time multimodal transportation information went live today in the lobby areas of all three hospitals in Oakland:
The displays show real-time information provided by our partner TransitScreen. The displayed information includes Port Authority bus arrival times, HealthyRide bike availability, UPMC Shuttle arrivals, Pitt Shuttle arrivals, and Zipcar/Uber availability.
Thank you very much to our UPMC partners for being early adopters!
Seed funding for the PittSmartLiving project was provided by the University of Pittsburgh (Office of the Vice Provost for Research) in the Fall of 2016. The goal of the pilot study was to evaluate the benefits of making realtime transportation information available to city dwellers and also the potential impact of incentives as a way to encourage prosocial behavior.