John Keefe and bus tracking service - Creative Confidence #17
John Keefe, a senior editor at Manhattan radio station WNYC, one day heard his colleague lament about how often her mom was left waiting at city bus stops, not knowing when the next bus would arrive.
He set out to find a solution.
New York City Transit would have taken weeks to get a system up and running. But John, within twenty-four hours, created a working prototype of a service. It allowed bus riders to call in, input their bus stop number, and hear the location of the next approaching bus (even without a smartphone).
So, how did he do it?
To bring the idea to life in such a short time, John had to get creative about using existing services. He bought a toll-free phone number for a dollar per month from Twilio, a service that connects a telephone number to web-based programs. He wrote a small program that sends the bus stop code to the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority site, accesses real-time location data, and then converts the answer from text to speech.
A few seconds later, the caller hears a message like this: “the next bus to arrive at Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue heading north is nine stops away.”
He did all that in a single day. And when we called the number a year later to check it out, the little hack was still working.
Lesson:
The first step towards being creative is often simply to go beyond being a passive observer and to translate thoughts into deeds.
[Creative Confidence Newsletter: 17 of 25]
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