Teaming Up with Rich and Eric

This weekend I was over at a friend’s house doing work when I got a call from my friend Katie. She invited over to dinner with a few of her friends, and I told her unfortunately I already had plans and probably couldn’t make it. Five minutes later Katie called back and said that she had just found out that one of her friends at the dinner party had been working on a map of bus routes in Amman. I responded: “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

At the dinner I met Katie’s friend, Rich, who has been working for a few months on gathering data on bus routes in Amman along with his friend Eric. Rich showed me some of the routes he had ridden—both bus and servees taxi lines—along with a paper and pencil sketch of a map they had been working on. They have a lot of great routes already mapped out, and since we’re basically working on the same idea, we’re very happily teaming up together to cover more bus lines and hopefully produce something of quality.

The next day Rich and I met up with Eric and I got to hear more about their project so far and their ideas going forward. First of all, it was great just talking busses, with questions like “How would you get from Webdeh to 7^th circle?” and then Eric or Rich would throw out a bus combination they knew of. Hopefully, when this project is finished, there will be a much easier and more accurate interface for answering that question than a bunch of guys scratching their heads in a coffee shop.

It’s really great that Rich brought up his bus project at that dinner with Katie, because if he hadn’t, it might have taken us a lot longer to find each other. Part of my hope with this blog is that people searching around on the internet for bus information in Amman might come across it, and use it as a way to connect with other public transit enthusiasts. Now that the three of us are working together, I think the pace of things can really pick up.