Response from the Danish Ministry of Transport
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Finally - after 4 months of trying - we are communicating*) with the danish Department of Transport; ehhh - well communicating might be stretching it, but we've received what appears to be a 'copy' of a "press-release kind-of-entry on the DoT's website" - or what do you think? Compare this to this!
*) we wrote 4 letters/emails (in january, february, march and april) to the DoT - and one might wonder why none of them were able to produce just a single question in the reply by the DoT - a rejection or a reaction?!
Guess we'll have to improve on our communication skills :(
Protocols
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A first stab at defining the required protocols for clients and servers to 'talk' to one another:
The general idea is for GTPR servers to function as a kind of 'routing servers' essentially providing DNS like services to Transport Provision servers (TP).
Issue: Liability
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Liability is an issue not easily discharged when speaking of transport, be that goods transportation or transporting people!
In the business world the issue is dealt with by suppliers and/or sellers of goods by ways of buying an insurance.
People travelling are not accustomed to making decisions as to the liabilities pertaining to their travel and they do not expect to have to buying insurance to cover such liabilities.
It certainly is an issue which must be investigated in detail to determine to what extend a service might be liable in the event that a user is injured whilst travelling on the provisions by the polet-service.
Issue: Payment
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Paying for transport is handled in a great number of ways: paying a cab-driver in cash, with a credit-card, using a voucher, etc.
When the price of the ride is partially subsidised things get even murkier with transporters required to charge not one party but two or more parties, and in order to account for the number of fares that they expect to be refunded partially for, transporters have to provide evidence of the fares provided.
Project meeting in Bruxelles
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Productive and informational
ALCO participated in a workshop in Bruxelles on Thursday 29th of March 2012 focused with testing common ground as to cooperation on a European level with a view to putting forward a joint EU project proposal.
Participants from Sweden, Estonia, Germany, Croatia, Spain and Denmark addressed issues pertaining to Road/Traffic Management.
Our focus is with goods/logistics and on a more altruistic note, with optimizing transport generally speaking. To that end we gave a short presentation which was well received.
Issues
The short break from day-to-day operations also provided us with a chance to evaluate and discuss issues pertaining to the Polet idea:
- how to address the I don't like to disclose my current location issue?
- what business models could provide the necessary incentives to enterprises investing in this idea?
- how to address the issue of data transfer when users are not within their own mobile network (roaming charges will kill the idea)?
- are transparent transport charges at all feasible - will competing transport providers disclose enough information?
We even managed to draw some conclusions as to one or two technical issues:
- the idea should be open source and possibly crowd-sourced
- cities/regions should be able to install their own regional Transport Alternatives Server(s) and interconnect using a common protocol
- handling transport offer requests among distributed TAS'es should work like DNS-lookups