Traveling around a city is typically considered a chore, something necessary to get from point A to point B. But why can’t the journey be the fun part? A game called Chromaroma does that in London:

People sign up and let Chromaroma track their movements using their Oyster cards, the London version of SmarTrip. People can see brightly colored visualizations of their travel, earn “points” for traveling, join teams to amass the most points and even complete “missions” like going to certain locations.

This is all possible because Transport for London has been willing to let Chromaroma access the travel data for individual members. That’s not a type of open data that WMATA or other local agencies yet support, but we could imagine a lot of great applications if an individual user can grant permission for a tool to access their personal data (but only if they so choose).

It’s the same way that Twitter of Facebook have applications that access your personal information: The application can’t see your tweets or your wall until you specifically grant it access. This “platform” strategy has done a lot to make these social networks the big powerhouses they are. A transit data “platform” could allow making riding much more fun.

Via Good.

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Tagged: data openness, london, technology, transit, uk

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.