Car-Less, Car-Lite Panel Discussion at the AADL Tonight
Tonight, getDowntown is partnering with the Ann Arbor District Library to bring you a panel discussion featuring local commuters who are living car-less and car-lite. The idea is to also have audience participation for this event, so please come and share your stories, too!
Here’s the blurb about the event (from the AADL website):
Car-lite, Car-less: A Panel Discussion On How We Commute to Work
Thursday May 8, 2008: 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm — Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room
Ever marvel at the bicyclists zooming by you in traffic downtown? Or gaze enviously at pedestrian commuters? Hear what local commuters Ed Vielmetti, Alaine Karoleff, Scott Munzel and Tamara Real have to say about their alternative commutes. The panelists will discuss their methods, challenges and surprises they encounter, and how using a sustainable mode of transportation helps them get more out of their commute.
This event is cosponsored by the getDowntown Program and the Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce in celebration of Curb Your Car Month. The getDowntown Program (www.getdowntown.org) encourages/assists downtown commuters in the use and development of sustainable transportation choices and is a partnership between the Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce, the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority, and the City of the Ann Arbor.
Thanks Nancy and Ira for organizing this, it was a lot of fun.
I talked a bit about Google Transit and how its route planning (however imperfect) has made a big difference in how I think about getting around town on the bus, since I don’t have to memorize route information quite so much any more.
It would be very good for other area transportation systems (the UM bus system, the Chelsea bus, the WWAVE, Michigan Flyer, and Michigan Amtrak systems) to be in that system as well, so that you could pretend that there was seamless integrated intermodal passenger transportation in the area, or at least so that you could discover how to get from point A to point B on public transit and note where there was opportunities for improvement.
Another piece which might actually be easy would be to get the AATA to publish to the public (and not just to Google) the data they use for Google Transit - it’s a fairly simple data format and I’ll bet the local collection of transit folks could remix that data into something else quite useful.
Comment by Edward Vielmetti — May 9, 2008 @ 9:43 am