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Geo-tag that Train Driver! Could Social Media somehow make one man’s commute run rather more smoothly?

Calling all commuters! If you knew – via the miracles of modern technology – that 300 foreign exchange students would be jostling their way into your train carriage at the next station down the line, might you perhaps be tempted to top up your latte and wait a few minutes longer for the next, student-free, service to arrive on your platform?

Here, in the first post of a regular new series – examining how Social Media might fix some of the myriad problems of “Broken Britain” – Media140 tech whizz and frequent long distance commuter, Benjamin Dyer, exercises his ire on the perennial problems of Public Transport and comes up with some rather novel solutions:

I think it’s a good idea to start with a confession. I know in this politically, correct, green washed world this is going to make me unpopular but I LOATH public transport. Without being too over the top, I would rather spend a day discussing fiscal policy with Alistair Darling than spend any time whatsoever on any form of train, bus or ferry. Putting it bluntly, my life is far too short to be breathing in others’ noxious gases while being stared at by the local weirdo.

However, I live on the Isle of Wight, while my office is a stone’s throw away from London – so sadly, while I may dream of discussing quantitative easing with big Al, I have no choice but to use public transport.

Yet public transport sucks; in this age of aggregated data and social networks, surely we should be able to make it better – but how?

My commute is pretty interesting; to travel from my house to the Royal Exchange building in the city (which I do fairly regularly) I encounter no less than five different types of public transport:

1. A chain ferry across the river Medina
2. The high speed boat from Cowes to Southampton
3. A bus to the station
4. The train to Waterloo
5. The Tube to Bank

Now, on a dream day, this is all manageable. However, on a normal day, it only takes a few of the cogs to spin faster or slower than the others for my day to end up in total disarray.

Let’s start with the boats: I have to say, for once, we are fairly forward thinking. Fellow traveller and friend Dr Andy Stanford-Clark got so fed up of missing the boat, he hooked the things up to Twitter!

Andy connected the boats GPS data, (which is freely available online) to twitter accounts @redjets and @red_ferries. When the boats enter or exit a predefined set of coordinates, the boat tweets its arrival or departure. It’s so simple, but it’s an excellent use of data, I now know if the boat is running late or floating lost somewhere in the Solent.

Onto leg two, the bus. Well it’s hard to be too critical of a free service, apart from the fact that it is cramped, smelly and can put me in a frightful mood, it is not too bad. However, taking it a step further, to bus services in general, there is an obvious solution.

A twittering bus may be useful to the small minority of us who use Twitter, but a live map? Surely that would add huge value. Each bus would be equipped with a GPS and a quick Google Map overlay of where each bus is and its route could thus be presented to travelers at each bus stop. You could even go the whole hog and make it available online or via mobile apps?

Trains are my third and final gripe. A lot has already been written regarding the use of train data. It does makes me cross: technically it’s our data anyway. However, brushing my negativity aside, there must be other ways we can make the train service better?

After spending 40 minutes waiting for a train because a driver wasn’t available, my initial thought would be to geotag train staff. Forgetting the legal and moral issues that may cause, it might also be quite fun. I can see a future with a great iPhone game “hunt the train driver” or “spot the picket line”.

Assuming that your train has a driver, what else can we do to make life a little easier? How about spinning the concept on its head, why can’t we tweet / SMS / RFID / Bluetooth the train to tell it we are on board? My rational is this: almost every train I use is over crowded. I once spent some time discussing this with a haggard looking ticket inspector and he tells me the whole eco-system is so disjointed, the rail operators really have very little real time data regarding usage of their service. If we could feedback to the operators, maybe they could do some joined up thinking with all this live data?

This data could even help us plan how we travel. Imagine the train itself alerting us to the fact that it is totally packed, or that there are 300 foreign exchange students waiting on the next platform up the line? That kind of information would definitely help me with my travel planning.

I don’t know, maybe my plans need a little joined up thinking of their own, or I could just drive. I’d be interested to have any of your bright ideas as to how Social Media could help fix public transport!

Next week, I’ll look at the bastion of British Institutions, the NHS.