Got Smartphone, Find Clean Transportation

Just in time for the holidays comes “City-Go-Round,” a site that lets you plug in an address or zipcode and get back links, descriptions and even ratings of various apps that track or locate public transportation in your area. The apps are grouped into categories, so finding public transit, biking, walking or driving apps becomes much less confusing.

The reviews and ratings help you figure out which one will give you the kind of information you need to get around. How about giving one of these apps as a holiday gift? If someone uses it to get around and save time or energy, it’s a little green for the holidays, right?

Chicagoland bikers can choose from Ride the City (4 stars), Bike Your Drive (2 stars) with its attempt track your bike mileage in terms of C02 offsets, or EveryTrail (2 stars.)

The site has a larger agenda, and that is to encourage government agencies to open up public data to the public in order to make public transit more convenient. The more convenient public transit is, the more we will all use it, thus conserving energy and curbing CO2. The site is supported by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, which is deliciously ironic because it was John D. Rockefeller who transformed oil into “black gold.”

According to the site, “lack of open data is the biggest barrier to software innovation. One of City-Go-Round’s goals is to make all public transit data public. To do this, we show the benefit of providing open data (innovative apps built on top of that data) and also provide a list of agencies who haven’t yet opened their data.”

They match two public transportation databases to identify which agencies do and don’t provide open data. And if you work for a transit agency, they tell you how to make sure the data from your organization is open.

See a sample for zipcode 60605.