Last night I attended the In Code We Trust meetup at Eyebeam, which was an excellent gathering of people talking about what they’re currently doing in the Gov 2.0 space.
One of the speakers was Sarah Kaufman from the MTA, highlighting the hard work they’re doing right now to help bring MTA information and data to the developer community. Check out the MTA data sets currently available including the new GIS information about subway entrances and exits.
Sarah’s talk reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time — create a simple calculator to figure out how much money to put on a MetroCard. The MTA vending machines make it easy to put an exact dollar amount on a card, but it doesn’t make it easy to figure out how to add 4 rides or 8 rides to a card. It’s not a hard problem, so I took 30 minutes last night and made a simple web page that figures this out for you. It should work on iPhone and Android, so check it out.
http://bit.ly/mtacalc |
Finally, I should add that I made this in 30 minutes, so it’s probably got bugs, but who cares? It’s usable. It’s a released product. It’s more important to get something out there and get feedback than to linger in development forever trying to make it “perfect”. Let me know what you think.
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