The purpose of this research was to facilitate the ongoing collection of information from the public about potential areas of multimodal service and infrastructure improvements and easily share these problems with transit agencies, departments of transportation, and city and county governments. The research team implemented open-source software that leveraged the Open311 issue-reporting standard to capture various types of data from actual users of public transportation via the OneBusAway mobile app, a real-time transit information system. Lessons learned from regional collaboration surrounding issue reporting and infrastructure improvements are discussed, as are the technical design and challenges behind implementing such a system. The results of six months of system deployment in Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties are presented, including specific examples of cross-jurisdictional and multimodal issues reported by the public. Using this crowd-sourced data and issue management tools, transit agencies, departments of transportation, and city and county government will be able to better target improvements to bike, pedestrian, and transit infrastructure. Contact Sean Barbeau, Ph.D. for more information.
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