[This one has been sitting in the queue, unfinished for awhile. Given the recent buzz about GPS, location-awareness and GIS for the people, I thought I’d dust it off and post it.]

I’ve recently been thinking about the implications of the mobile phone as something almost every now has in their pockets (joining keys, money and ID), and the fact GPS technology will inevitably be integrated with wirelessly networked devices. While waiting for the bus on a cold winter days, I like to think about how to shorten that wait. In what ways might ubiquitous, networked, geographically aware devices have allow us to (re)design a transit systems to be more dynamic? If people can communicate (easily) their travel intent to the system ahead of time (or in real time), the system might be better able to adjust service to meet those demands.

In dense urban areas, this is less of a problem. Unfortunately, mass transit doesn’t scale down very well — cars are the default dynamic transit option, which sit around wasting space most of their useful life. Perhaps if routes for smaller vehicles (large taxis? small buses?) could adapt dynamically to the travel desires of a population we could make better use of our resources in less dense urban areas. Anyway, that’s abstract, but worth thinking about as one of many things that may (or may not) be altered by the coming location-aware near future.

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