Hackathon winners make life easier for public transport users

Auckland’s first “civic hackathon” HACKAKL:Transport was a great success with 340 people taking part.

Designers, developers and innovators came together for a weekend of 'hacking for good’.

HACKAKL:Transport was supported by Auckland Transport in conjunction with AUT University and software house Propellerhead. The weekend brought together bright minds who are interested in utilising open government data to develop fresh ideas that will help improve Auckland.
In the run-up to the event, Auckland Transport made available a beta application programming interface (API) that opened up a wide range of the organisation's data, including real-time bus information, geo-coding, roading and congestion data.

The winners of the HP Supreme Award took the current Auckland Transport mobile application and significantly enhanced it.

The My AT 2.0 team of Eddie Chae, Kyungmo Kang, Donghan Kim and Jingun Lee (photo attached) developed a working example for most features including one which lets customers save a selection of multiple favourite destinations and or trips; it can also compare the journey time and cost between public transport and a private vehicle.

The team’s application also shows you the estimated time to upcoming stops and it lets the customer give feedback on their public transport trip.

Auckland Transport’s, General Manager Business Technology, Roger Jones says the MY AT 2.0 team also came up with a customised app. to allow payments “on-the-go” for public transport.

“This is exactly the sort of thing we were hoping for. Great ideas which could be useful for everyone who uses public transport, we will now be working with the team to develop these concepts to a fully functioning product.”

Propellerhead, Managing Director, Andrew Weston says "I am completely invigorated by the community engagement and the commitment of all the participants at HACKAKL.

"I really didn't know what to expect from our humble idea to being just blown away by what can be done in two days with a committed group of civic hackers."

Some other ideas from the event include an application letting parents track their children on public transport, another that analyses data against public transport routes and times to determine the impact on low social economic areas.

Mr Jones says there was also an application that predicts and then alerts you so you start walking to your public transport pick-up point just in time to catch the ride.

“There were a lot of great ideas thrown round and developed, the challenge now is to make sure we use these to improve the public transport experience in Auckland.”

My AT 2.0 also won the Fujitsu Most Popular Award, a $500 gift voucher, this was based on the public vote of those attending the Hackathon.

For their efforts MY AT 2.0 won a Tablet donated by HP for each team member.

See the final submissions for Hackathon: http://hackakl-2014.challengepost.com/submissions

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