Archived: TfL, AWS and Geovation Hack Week – Data in Motion #1

Join us for a Hack Week launching on 23 September in London in partnership with AWS and Geovation to provide some great products for transport users. The use of our open data sets are fuelling entrepreneurship, accelerating scientific discovery, and enabling Londoners and visitors to travel more easily across the capital.

This Hack Week provides the opportunity to win some great prizes, including 6 months worth of support i.e. office space, business mentoring, access to technical and subject matter experts. So, whether you’re a start-up or a developer, if you are in a position to develop a product that addresses the challenges outlined below, you should join us at the launch event on 23 September. All entries will be judged by a panel in a closed environment to protect your idea.

There are over 500 apps powered by TfL data used by millions of people every day – we would like to see more.

Where and When

Venue: Amazon’s offices – 60 Holborn Viaduct, EC1A 2FD, London and remote access (more detail to follow.)
View on Google Maps
When: Hack for a week: September 23 – September 30, 2016. There will be two launch sessions on 23rd September, at 12pm and 6:00pm, so join whichever one works for you.

Free drinks and nibbles will be provided at the launch sessions.

We're partnering with AWS and Geovation for the Hackathon from September 23-30 and we want your solutions help to manage the capacity of London’s transport network
We’re partnering with AWS and Geovation for the Hack Week from September 23-30 and we want your solutions help to manage the capacity of London’s transport network


Through this transport-focused Hack Week TfL, Geovation and AWS are keen to work with the start-up community, app developers, UX and design specialists, and anyone with a passion for data in order to build new applications and unlock new insights from the data.

Hack Week: Managing the Capacity of London’s Transport Network – September 23-30

There are 30 million journeys made in London everyday. The purpose of the Hack Week is to use the datasets to find ways to maximise capacity on the public transport network, maximise capacity on the roads network, and improve air quality.

Maximising capacity on the public transport network: TfL is committed to improving customer journeys and increasing the capacity of services to cope with increasing passenger numbers.

Customers have told TfL they would like more information to help them avoid the busiest times and places. This might be by taking a different route, making a small change to travel time, or even travelling in a different way. You could help offer a quicker and more comfortable journey.

Maximising capacity on the roads network: London’s rapid population growth, increasing economic activity, and rising traffic volumes is posing a set of challenges for the road network.

By 2018, we expect to see around 1.25m more trips each day on the roads. Therefore, to maintain road network performance, we need to increase the effective capacity of the roads, and move from not just dynamically managing London’s streets in real time, but to make the jump towards predictively managing them.

Help us to optimise the use of road space capacity and ensure we can recover capacity quickly when incidents occur.

Topics we would like the Hack Week to focus on are; understanding the capacity of the road network in real time, detecting incidents and their impact on network capacity in real time, and visualising the state of the road network and predicting how it will look into the near future.

Air quality: For TfL, our role is more than simply getting people from A to B quickly. We also want to make London cleaner and greener and contribute to a better quality of life for Londoners, now and in the future.

Air quality is the biggest environmental challenge to face London. We want to know when and what is the best way is to provide customers with information that can influence behavioural change around being ‘greener.’

Join us at the Hack Week and get access to AWS solutions architects, TfL staff, and Geovation technical experts to help to take your idea forward.

What you’ll need

You will need to bring a laptop and you will need an AWS account. AWS credits and an API will be provided to access the data.

How it works

  • The Hack Week will launch on 23 September to share the challenges
  • Surgeries with subject matter experts will be hosted from September 26-29
  • Your entry will be judged on September 30 at the same venue or you can attend remotely – more details to follow.

Already have some ideas? You’ll need to register in advance of the event – please follow this link to register and to find out more info on the Hack Week.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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