TrackYourCity - Mapping public transport from scratch
   By Uli Strotz, Isabel Flores
   Live captioning by Norma Miller.
   @whitecoatcapxg
   
   My name is Uli Strotz, I am [inaudible]
   Before I go deeper into the topic, how we do this, actually, I'd like to give you just a general overview about why we need this data and kind of in what kind of industry we work and what's our perspective on that industry. I don't put in there to confirm old stereotypes about Germans. I rather want to emphasize something else.  So lots of things changed. But again, the public transport companies, if you look at this bus, a bus in London in the '80, and you look at this bugs, a bus in London today. it looks a lot cooler. It's basically the internet and data didn't happen and that's exactly where we want to step in as a company and we want to change this. Our vision is we want to bring to the world on demand public transport anywhere in the world, so not only in Berlin, not only in the US, also in Africa. In the city and in the countryside. What is on demand public transport? I want to show you a little video that explains the concept a little bit further.
   [Video]
   >> Yeah, this was a long vision of the company, where we want to go. The reason why I want to do this is pretty obvious for us and probably also for you, we want to reduce traffic jams, we want to reduce emissions in cities, we want to remove parking spaces and we want to have better commutes. We want them to be more productive, more fun and more enjoyable. And for this I want to explain the ecosystem, to kind of show you how we want to get to a system like this. And basically there are three steps in this ecosystem. The first step is the mobility app. We have an app. It doesn't work in Seattle unfortunately but it works in Europe and parts of Africa and South America. It basically tells you how to get from A to B with public transport options. The second component in this ecosystem is our mobility Analytics, so the app serves as a sensor to produce insights so we learn how a city works. Major clusters in a city where people move and the last step once we understand how the city works, we apply this data and bring mobile mobility into the city.
   The first one is the app and that's how it looks like. The coverage as I said, is mainly around Europe, here, and we have a strong focus on South America and we're also starting to work in Africa.
   Now, this ecosystem, at the beginning of the ecosystem, we want to launch an app in the city. In North America would be quite easy, we go to the public transport authority and they provide us open data. It's the same in Germany and Europe. This is very different in South America and Africa. There we were facing the problem there is simply no data. A bunch of people reached out to us, hey, I think your idea is cool, can we do this in our city, but we quickly realized there was no data available. Not even on OpenStreetMap. So you might have roads on OpenStreetMap but you don't have public transport data available. That's why we launched track your city as a separate project from the company. What it basically is we want to help communities to track their own public transport system, so if people in a city think hey, my public transport system sucks, my daily commute is terrible, we want to help them get to a better public transport system. First you have to do an analysis, what is the current state, where are the current buses going, what are the current bus stops and how does this work? The first city we did was in Tanzania. Track your city has three steps. They don't have to be like the biggest techies, but they have to have an interest in mapping. The second step is it's really simple we're going to track the whole public transport system in a city by using a smartphone, and then the third step is we clean up all this data and put it into OpenStreetMap, make it publicly available to everyone. We as a company take it out again and use it in our app, but anybody else can use it. Going to walk you through all these steps a little further. So the first step is building a community. In the middle you see Isabelle. And she wanted to come but it didn't work out in the end, she's the project manager and she's really skilled in building communities and helping people to do track your city, so ideally we only help people to do track your city, give them the tools, give them some advice, but they run it themselves and it's a project for them. And what we do at the beginning when we like create a community, we do a lot of education, so we give them advice what kind of apps to use so here at the bottom left you see a tutorial Emily made. So you use this app called OSM end to track the routes and the next step that's the most important thing. We create a list of all the routes we want to track. This sounds really simple, but it's really very difficult. Most cities they have no inventory at all in Africa, what bus routes there are. So this is a lot of inventory to find out what we want to track but we put a lot of emphasis on this, what we want to track in order to know what we're done and to have clean data in the end. Once we're done with this list we work with the community on an editing community, so what kind of tags do we use and how do we want to put this into OpenStreetMap. We usually get some advice and ultimately the people have the knowledge what kind of tax base they use and we don't want to put our billing approach on top of them. And here you see Emily going out to the bus tracking the routes and then in the end putting it on OpenStreetMap. So what OSM does, it uploads the data to OSM traces and then we use iD editor to edit the data. So once we established the community, explain things how it works, we send out the students. So they go out, this is now a small animation in Dar es Salaam, the first city we did, and then the people get into the buses. So you see one here at the top left, there are these small mini buses and then we tracked and Dar es Salaam. It was messy data. So people turn on the GPS in their house instead of in the bus stop and so it was learning for us that we can apply to other cities where we're going to run this. The third step is the most complicated step. Most people that work with us have never done -- have never worked with OSM. It's completely new for them so we have to do a lot of education. We recommend to them to use the iD editor. Which is a little easier to use than JOSM, but they often get frustrated and so we put it into OpenStreetMap that they get the first feeling really quick and once there is one bus route in OpenStreetMap, we can already launch our app and that gives them a really cool feeling so they go out and track another route and this keeps them motivated and do the other routes. We have. We give them feedback if they use the tags and that we agreed on or if they use different tags, if the geometry is invalid or valid. So they always get these feedback reports to help them find potential mistakes, so we make sure at the end of the project all the data is clean in OpenStreetMap. So we did this in three cities, Dar es Salaam, Lusaka, and Tijuana.
   And we really want to improve this. First step is to get the data. The next step is the mobility analytics. So here you see a map. So we have all the data we can now analyze, what does this mean for a city? So you see here a BRT bus system and the data that Tyler earlier referenced in his presentation that is now analyzed, what hospitals can be accessed with public trons port, so we can do different analysis. Here's an analysis from Berlin. What you see here is the accessibility Tegel airport. So you see the majority of the city cannot get to the airport within 30 minutes. And from the data we look at who actually wants to go to the Tegel airport. So you see supply and demand doesn't really matter up here. It's just one example how we can analyze data. To bring them into the third step to improve the public transport system. With this on the map mobility.
   That's the third step of the cycle and that's what the company actually works right now on really heavy to bring this on-demand bus system in Berlin and once we have it in Berlin on the ground and have some first experiments, we're going to do it in other cities like Dar es Salaam and other cities. And there's the group, 35 people. And that's it. Thank you.
   [applause]
   You in the back, please?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So, I was actually in Berlin at the conference in 2015 and I went to Tegel Airport and it occurred to me how it is you're getting data about who wants to go to Tegel versus who actually is -- can you tell me about how you get the date what why wants to go?
   >> So the question is how do we get the data on who wants to go to the airport? We call this the supply and demand data. This is something we get back from the app. So after we do track your city as a project, we launch the app in the city and then run it for one month or two months and then we get this data where we learn from here to here people want to go and this is how we start to learn how a city works.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  How are you dealing with the temporal aspect of it and the dynamic aspect? I assume a place like Dar es Salaam, there are probably errors, how are you dealing with that?
   >> Yeah it's a really important topic. Right now we generate static data and we put it also in the app like this. It's static data. People are quite surprised. There's no Google Maps or anything like that but they do appreciate that so when you launch the app you can release sensors in the app to get real time data. But that's quite tricky. You guys, please?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Are you working with the public transportation companies. [inaudible] or a service like Uber that you're working with?
   >> So in the first phase. Repeat the question.
   >> The question is if we launch these buses or self or if we work with the public transport companies. In the first phase in Berlin we launched them ourself. But that's just for us to learn how it works. In the long run we don't really want to just throw another product in the system. And. We want to do it with them. We don't want to provide cars and hire drivers, that's not so much our interest. We rather want to generate data and understand how the city works and advise public transport companies how to do it. Yes?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So when you're talking about the door to door element of this service, what have you found as sort of the right unit of delivery that works financially? Is it a van or is it a bus or how many people are have you found are moving together in a way that allows you to actually [inaudible]
   >> Yeah, and that's something we played with right now on these time windows, how long are people willing to take a detour and stuff. Right now we work with five people in one car. But we depend -- it depends from city to city, so in Dar es Salam, or the mini buses in Mexico City, because they already work this way, and we just want to make it a little more digital and bring this concept also to Berlin which doesn't have it. Yes you please?
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  So the first part of the process is gathering information on routes, on, you know, that have a certain fixed quality? Are you able to import GPS data as an alternative to crowdsourcing and then if you do crowdsource, are you able or and/or willing to export data for other applications?
   >> I'll repeat that question. The question is, I think, two questions. If we if there's information available if we can use this and then the if we can generate -- we just use it as it is, because what we do actually is we run track your city, put the data into OpenStreetMap, export it and generate 2GFS. And that's what we do on our side as a company. But track your city it once the data is in OpenStreetMap is kind of how we structured it for now, we don't generate 3 DVFS. Does this answer your question?
   >> Yeah. OK.
   Hello, I'm SRI. I am hearing impaired. Uber app, I had OpenStreetMap to is much cheaper if I save a lot of money if looking for driver, than I got actually one, so it is 50% cheaper than.
   >> Yeah. You're right. And so Uber pool is very similar to what we're aiming for. The difference is that we want to improve the current public transport system and not necessarily target the taxi market and add a new product. We rather want to find the weak spots in the current transport system and try and improve this with an on-demand service and Uber is not active in Africa now. Which might change soon, I don't know. Yeah.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  
   >> How do you plan to work with you? So you need quite a bit of marketing to get lots of people using this application at the same time.
   >> Yes. Yeah, the question is the business model requires a lot of users in order to get the insights. This depends from city to city, so to launch an app like this in Berlin, you have to do a lot of marketing. In Berlin we have the advantage, we have the locals so we can really localize it. If we would launch it in New York, which we don't do, we probably would waste all our money on marketing. In Africa and South America, it's very different because there's no competition. No one has this data. Google doesn't have the data, so we basically don't need to do marketing to get people on board. It's one of the reasons why we're interesting in this area.
   >> How do we make money, right now we're a startup, we do not earn money right now. And in the long run, we -- the app itself will always stay for free. How we want to earn money is by selling the data and also the algorithms to public transport companies, so we want to consult them on how they run their public transport system. So we work very closely with the BBC in Berlin and those kind of companies.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  
    [speaking off mic]
   And how do you connect stocks to those --
   >> So the question is how we we store the data in OpenStreetMap itself. So bus routes are relations, they're relations of ways off the roads but if they are only stops, you can also make a relation of the systems of stops. But there are two versions of public transport. Very interesting, in Dar es Salaam, we made installations of ways and we don't have bus stops in there. It would be an additional tracking effort, so what we did there, we interpolate them, so every hundred meters we create a bus stop, so that works quite well. In other cities, in Lusaka, we did have the bus stops. But it's a lot of manual work and the volunteers once they see something in the app, they're kind of happy and then it fades away and so that's also one of the challenges we work with to keep the volunteers motivated and in the end it's their project. Sometimes they're really motivated and want to get all the bus stops in there and even continue in editing OpenStreetMap. But sometimes it fades away quickly. Yeah, all right. Thank you:
   [applause]