Encouraging greater public transport use: give people the tools they want, says Yan

Wellington, July 24 (JY&A Media) Mayoral candidate Jack Yan believes that opening up Wellington’s public data, especially for transport, can play a role in innovation and economic diversification, as part of a greater plan to build the city’s economy. ‘Opening up Metlink data,’ he says, ‘would encourage greater public transport usage for a start.’

He says that by providing public data, Wellington developers to create apps and other programs. He identifies the real-time information used by Metlink as a prime candidate, from which a Wellington company can use the data for live maps of where buses and trains are, helping commuters and encouraging greater use of public transport.

‘We can encourage greater use of public transport if people have tools that appeal to them,’ he says. ‘People want predictability, and the ability to plan their day. Right now, we still don’t have enough when it comes to public transport.’

Mr Yan is in favour of opening more of the city’s data to the public, and points to a competition in Maine earlier in June where netizens took public data and created projects to help the community.
‘Opening up data can not only show off our creative abilities as a city, but bring people together,’ he says. ‘It’s a small part of a much wider plan.

‘We can innovate and ensure that everything that the city currently measures with water and power usage is made public, so our best and brightest minds can come up with conservation and energy solutions.

‘We keep saying we are the creative capital, yet we don’t seem to tap in to this very creativity,’ he says.

Mr Yan says that with more older voters than younger voters, some of the fresh ideas to make our services more appealing to “wired” users have been ignored by some candidates. ‘They are under a mistaken belief that older voters would not find such ideas useful, or they are choosing to ignore younger voters because they do not provide enough votes.’

He says, ‘The best ideas have the potential to go global, and similar ones in New Zealand’s past—such as the computer graphics used to track America’s Cup entrants or TV weather maps—have gone on to be export earners for us.’

Apps are already a major export earner for New Zealand presently.

Other public data should be made available, he says, including public documents that currently are only available to citizens with official information requests. ‘They should be searchable, too,’ says Mr Yan. ‘The cost of putting them online is far lower than printing them out and posting them to people.’
He says that if Wellington is to be a creative capital, it needs to get its fundamentals right.
Mr Yan’s manifesto features more ideas on transparency and transport.

He was the first mayoral candidate to publish a manifesto in April on his website (http://jackyan.com or http://backjack2013.com). It has a 10-point plan on kick-starting Wellington’s economy. He is the only candidate regularly conducting international business, with a strong entrepreneurial record, and has formally mentored Wellington businesses since 2006.

In 2010, he had campaigned on free wifi for the inner city and waterfront, now a reality and used by a record number of people in Wellington.

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