Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools.

Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable.

You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative — these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That’s not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton’s vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he’s lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton’s open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards… [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."

Portland, Oregon has already used his open-source software to plan its bus routes. San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he’s in talks with the city to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of a private company that provides sub-par support.

"They’re frustrated and thinking about replacing it completely, and see the value of open-source because then they won’t have any of these support problems," he said. "And they won’t be constantly at the mercy of the private companies that have these little mini-monopolies."

The Open Planning Project (TOPP) was Gorton’s first foray into urban planning, in 1999. It initially involved an ambitious plan to use open-source software to model public transportation and traffic systems in large cities.

"I was much more naive at the time," he said. "I thought, ‘I can make software. I’ll go build an open-source traffic and transportation model, which will show how much better things can be, and then go magically adopt those solutions."

But humans can be harder to program than machines, and sometimes a human-to-human interface works best. "We’ve actually been incredibly successful transforming policy in New York City without any models at all," he added, though some residents complained about parking spaces morphing into bike lanes.

The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.

While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.

"It didn’t really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it’s all running on proprietary systems and you couldn’t get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are.

Portland, Oregon’s TriMet bus system is building a multi-modal trip planner using OpenLayers [updated], an open-source visualization tool for GeoServer data, that will let people plan trips involving multiple forms of transportation.

"If you say, ‘I want to bike to the bus and then walk from there,’ Google and MapQuest have no idea what you’re talking about," Gorton explained. "But it’s actually really useful information if you’re talking about a world where you’re trying to get people out of their cars."

The next challenge is to add complexity to the system, so that the modeling software can incorporate more factors.

"All of the modeling technologies that I’ve worked with and seen so far come with so many caveats," said the urban planning expert Wright. "Trying to capture the very very complex systems of urban communities… creates incredible layers of complication. We’ve just scratched the surface of the way these [tools] are going to transform decision-making and urban planning."

Although its developers charge $70,000 for the full Enterprise version of GeoServer and $200/hour for time spent customizing the OpenGeo stack for a specific application, this is an open-source project. As such, it borrows from previous work. The core of Portland’s trip planning software had already been built by David Emory, a previously unrelated developer who made a similar system for the Atlanta Transit Riders’ Advocacy & Information Network (ATRAIN).

"Once you have something working in one city, the work it takes to port it to the next is a lot smaller," said Gorton.

If information and technology comes from the people, the thinking seems to go, perhaps the government will plan better towns and cities for them. It’s a nice bit of symmetry.

Here’s where the livable cities movement is going next, according to Gorton:

1. More sophisticated open source city models

Planning software will add land use factors, so that towns and cities can ensure that transportation line up better with zoning. The two issues are intertwined in reality, so the model needs to reflect that.

2. Federal funding could come into play

The Obama administration might pump federal dollars into bike lanes, public space reclamation, traffic calming, and maybe even open-source urban planning projects.

3. Blogs and videos

He funds two social websites: Streetsblog.org, which employs seven full-time reporters and editors who cover "the livable streets movement" and Streetfilms.org, for which a three-person film crew chronicles innovative traffic solutions from around the world. A typical story on the new San Francisco version of Streetsblog concerns the potential destruction of the bike lane on Octavia.

4. Buses will become even more like trains

Buses have already learned a few tricks from trains: pre-paid tickets, elevated platforms, multiple doors and dedicated lanes. Bogota, Columbia recently implemented many of these recommendations (video).



5. You’ll become (more?) familiar with "para-transit" and "traffic calming"



Open-source software could coordinate small fleets of vans to replace or supplant bus service in sparse and dense areas by only going where and when people need to go. Para-transit involves matching people, locations and vehicles in the most efficient way possible, sort of like a big, socially-networked cross between buses (which follow the same routes each day) and taxicabs (which don’t scale).

Meanwhile traffic calming (video to the right) involves designing roads to make drivers more mindful of pedestrians and bicyclists while opening up space for non-car activities on what used to be road. One example is a Manhattan crosswalk on Madison Ave. that used to force pedestrians to traverse a crosswalk as long as two football fields. The same space now features tables, chairs and bushes where New Yorkers gather to check their e-mail for five seconds already.

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Photos courtesy of Streetsblog, Mark Gorton, and the Open Planning Project