Photo of Transportation Camp West by Steve Vance

We’re participating in two exciting events in the coming days:

If you know what it feels like to be left out of transportation decisions in your neighborhood, town, or city, you should know that there are people who share your frustration and are also working hard to make planning more inclusive.

One effort that signals the emerging movement of open transportation is a unique convening called TransportationCamp. Camp: the word implies a temporary gathering away from home, and usually a lot of fun. And the word campers also implies a collective of supporters along a certain line of thinking. The doctrine of TransportationCamp is openness, people, and technology, and over the last few years it’s proven to be both substantive and fun. Who should attend? Anyone who cares about how transportation works! TransitCenter will participate in the DC-area convening in Arlington, Virginia on Saturday January 11 2014. RSVP here, we’d love to see you there.

A related branch of this discourse is the emerging movement of researchers, practitioners, and technologists who collaborate to make sense of flexible and informal public transportation systems in cities around the world. The key to their work is open transit data – the collection, the maintenance, and the availability of information to give people greater access to mobility options. TransitCenter is co-hosting with the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership a workshop on Wednesday, January 15 during the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting. This workshop, a follow-up to the popular GTFS for the Rest of Us workshop last November, intends to extend the reach of open transit data group. Policymakers, practitioners of all stripes are welcome to join us. RSVP here.