Avego, Crowdsourcing Public Transit

The bottom-up, interoperable transit network as a solution for our time

While other companies and people have implemented systems of ridesharing before (from vanpooling to pre-arranged ridematching using on-line communities like Craigslist), Avego is the first to attempt to unify cars, vans and buses into a “multi-modal” approach, from the bottom up.

Traditionally public transit (or public transport, as it’s called in Europe) is orchestrated by a central planning authority which manages the entire public transit network for a metropolitan region or a particular city. In other words, a top-down approach of organizing the whole network by laying out rail systems, subways and a variety of bus routes to create the complete system. Needless to say, these types of systems take decades of painstaking planning and huge investments of infrastructure to get set up and operating. But when they do work, they can work extremely well.

On the other hand, cars and taxi systems work from the bottom-up, from individuals making personal choices that lead to a personal transport system that isn’t reliant on centralized planning. These types of systems are infinitely flexible, don’t require much in the way of infrastructure investment or planning. But, they can also lead to the kind of wastefulness that we see today in the clogged highways and empty SOV (single occupancy vehicle) cars on roads throughout the world during rush hours.

Avego’s Real-time Ridesharing is the first public transit network that is designed to grow from the bottom up, dynamically expanding by creating new options for people as the power of the crowd and of “collaborative consumption” (see Avego’s January 2011 newsletter), enables new options for people, in real-time.

The Growth of the Internet, the ultimate interoperable network

While most of the power of this system is yet to be discovered, as the Avego transport network grows the benefits of our approach will become clearer. It reminds us of the story of the growth of the Internet itself. Before the days of the Internet, data transport networks needed to be set up in extremely static and pre-planned ways. Like today’s pre-arranged ridesharing systems, which require individuals to contact other individuals and pre-book rides, the old data network systems also required painstaking definition and pre-arrangement, and there was no easy way to move information from one system, inter-network, to another. E-mail systems didn’t interoperate, custom gateway vendors charged huge amounts to connect one type of computer to a different type of computer, et cetera.

The internet changed all that. By allowing bottom-up networks to be established and instantly interlinked and configured to interoperate, the network was able to grow extremely rapidly once the technology existed that made it easy enough for people to use (after 1996).

Avego’s Intermodal Transit Network

Avego’s systems, by allowing “intermodal” travel (the ability to switch between one form of transport, like cars, to another form of transport, like buses or vanpools), Avego also allows commuters to more readily take advantage of switching to the most appropriate modes where they are available. Avego is the first system that allows ridesharing to enable display of vanpools and bus transit information on the same interface that displays carpools. While it will take years for the world to fully embrace this technology, again it is comparable to the data networks of the 1990s… by allowing data to switch between mainframe computers and Unix/Linux servers to personal computers, intermodal data transport was enabled and the development of critical mass was much more possible. The Internet was able to grow very rapidly after that.

Each of Avego’s systems can work in a standalone format. A city can implement just real-time ridesharing, or just Avego’s Futurefleet RTPI, or set-up vanpooling. And the individual systems will work great on their own. In fact, for real-time ridesharing, individuals can set up their own routes without any city or metropolitan organization getting involved.

But together, Avego’s systems can do miraculous things. Avego’s systems for the National Transport Authority of Ireland allows dozens of bus operators to share tickets and revenue across one smartcard system, as the systems roll out later this year and into 2013. Avego’s systems throughout California and other parts of the US are interoperable for real-time ridesharing, allowing one digital wallet to pay for transport throughout the network.

So, by crowdsourcing public transport, Avego is working with any number of consumer drivers/riders, plus bus companies, plus world-leading vanpool operators to show how a unified and interoperable transport network can provide reliable transport for the 21st century commuter. It will take a few years, but in five or ten years time, we hope people will wonder what they did before Avego.