GAM's Big Release

There has been some pretty big developments this week, chief among them was the launching on Thursday of a new GAM website that contains the routes of what looks like all of Amman's busses, coasters (the smaller, 20 person busses), and service taxi routes. You can check out the write-up of the launch from the GAM's website here.

The website uses the traditional platform for Amman's Department of Geographical Information Services (GIS). The GIS Department has for years run a website which is chock full of geographic data. It's got everything from the locations of Amman's streetlights to its sewage pipes. If, for example, you were curious to see the placement and species of all the trees along the main roads in Jabal Amman and Jabal Weibdeh, GIS is where you want to go:

They haven't quite gotten to the side streets yet

The new, transportation-only site (ammancitygis.gov.jo/transportation) has a similar ethos in terms of putting out a lot of data, which then requires the user to wade through it a bit.

I've only become to scratch the surface of the 91 bus routes, 98 coasters, and 153 service taxi lines that are included on the site. The website requires that you download the program Silverlight, but I wouldn't let this deter you because the information within is worth pouring over. Once you do download Silverlight, a map of Amman pops up, with the three modes of transportation listed on the right (and the pictures are handy for as well). After clicking one of the vehicle types, you get a drop-down list of all of the different routes in the city for that mode of transit:

The bus drop-down menu

Most of the routes are named according to their terminal points, though a few also include major stops along the way which is much more helpful if you're scanning to find a bus near you. When you click on a route, it zooms in on the map and displays that single route line in yellow:

Ma7atta to Marj Al Hamam, aka the 103

At the moment, this site is not hugely helpful for the average bus rider who is trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B. There's no way to view all the lines at once, so you have to search through the drop-down menus line by line. If you aren't sure whether a coaster, bus, or service is best for your trip, you may need to look through all three of the drop-down menus. Since most of the routes are listed in the drop-down menus just as terminal points, riders who want to get on or off somewhere along the middle of a route may have a hard time finding which bus they should take. And finally, the larger busses in Amman all have numbers associated with them that people frequently use (e.g. you can take the 426 from 3rd Circle to get to the Ma7atta), but this website has left off the numbers which can make it harder to find the bus you want.

With this much data however, there is a lot of informational potential energy that developers and the GAM can use to turn out some really useful products. Hazem Zuraiqat, a leader of the public transportation advocacy group Ma3an Nasil (Together We Arrive), was the one who put me onto the new website and told me that the GAM is planning to use these routes to build trip planners and a 2D map. What I think is great is that by making the data public, they're allowing for private developers to get into the game and make use of the data, which will hopefully help produce user-friendly trip planners and innovations in the not too distant future. From a quick check, it does look like a few of the routes, particularly the service routes, are a little out of date with changes that have been made in one-way roads. Nonetheless, this data is a huge step forward that will accelerate the process of developing more advanced tools to make improve the quality and ease of use of Amman's public transit networks .

I'd like to give a special thanks to Hazem for meeting with me the other day and walking me through many of the issues and developments in public transportation in Amman. Now that this data is public, there are a lot of next steps that can be taken. If you're interested in getting involved, or are already doing a transit-related project, send me a message at peter.damrosch@gmail.com.