Public Works Office

Selected Work

We borrow methods from art and design to make public technology understandable, interoperable and responsive to the people who use it. Projects Jeff has led or contributed to, at Public Works Office and earlier at Intersection, Control Group, Cambridge Systematics and OpenPlans:

An Advertising Concession-funded Vision For Improving The Transit Customer-Experience

A template vision for Intersection, as a transit/out-of-home advertising concessionaire, to improve the experience of transit in major US cities with new customer amenities and the acceleration of agency efforts to grow and retain ridership.

Presented in multiple proposals as a roadmap that included leveraging digital assets like advertising screens to better communicate with riders, sponsored in-station WiFi, funding of capital improvements such as new station lighting, wayfinding efforts and accessibility improvements, better customer information on things like elevators and escalators, as well as new street furniture including in-station benches and bus shelters.

Cited by LA Metro's board in January 2018 as a key reason for splitting its advertising concession and awarding Intersection a 10-year rail contract, with a $42.9M minimum guarantee to Metro and a $19.7M privately funded investment in digital customer information (board report). Even in cases of non-award, some ideas went on to be tested by the agency's own internal teams.

With Intersection. Project role: key author and subject matter expert, proposal project manager.
Sidewalk Labs: A Vision For The City Built From The Internet Up

A "sketch" technology vision for the next generation city built "from the Internet up", including proposals to increase physical accessibility of the built environment for humans and machines, common infrastructure for the 3D mapping of the built environment, as well as technology to enable the transportation, density and experience goals of the architects and designers of the district. Presented to the Alphabet board and submitted, in part, as Sidewalk Labs' vision for Sidewalk Toronto.

With Intersection and Sidewalk Labs. Project role: key author and subject matter expert.
LinkNYC: A Next-Generation Replacement for New York City's Aging Payphones

In 2013, New York City's payphone franchise was about to expire. Since the creation of the franchise a decade earlier, the world had changed: pay phone use was declining in the face of rising cellular phone adoption, and last-mile connectivity to the Internet was a pressing challenge as the Internet became a daily necessity for New Yorkers. To figure out how to proceed, the Bloomberg administration put a call for proposals out to the City's best product design firms to design a payphone of the future while improving city-wide connectivity to the Internet.

Answering the call, Control Group, in collaboration with Titan, an existing payphone franchise holder, collaborated on LinkNYC: two 55" screens to display advertising that would fund the project, with a smaller tablet with no ads that offered free phone calling, access to digital city services, as well as gigabit WiFi service broadcast within a radius of the Link, via a completely new fiber optic network that would ideally leverage existing conduits and rights-of-way for cables used by the payphones.

The City's response was overwhelmingly positive: after securing award and approval of the project in 2014, efforts began to deliver on the promises made: transit arrival information, community-engaged content such as lost pet notices and local business promotions, access to social services-related content on the tablet, and community benefits like the installation of environmental sensors from the "Array of Things" project in Chicago intended as a laboratory to test "smart city" ideas in New York City with institutions like NYU and Cornell Tech.

By 2019, nearly 1500 LinkNYC kiosks were installed, providing millions of New Yorkers and visitors access to gigabit+ WiFi and information to engage with the city, all at no cost to taxpayers.

With Control Group and Titan. Project role: partnerships lead, including content provider, wireless offload and environmental sensors from UChicago/The Argonne National Laboratory; proposal project manager, including offer preparation, demos and conference representation.
Citi Bike: Stabilizing New York City's Bike Share Through Rapid Growth and Change of Ownership

Technology advisory to stabilize the back office of one of the country's first and largest public bike share systems during a period of unprecedented demand and an operator transition, plus transaction advisory through its acquisition by private investors (and, eventually, Lyft).

With Control Group. Project role: technology stabilization and transaction advisory.
LinkNWK: Bringing Link to Newark Through an Asset-Sharing Partnership With the City

Brought Link's advertising-funded kiosks, with free WiFi, phone calls and city services, to Newark, NJ, through an asset-sharing agreement in which the City of Newark provides fiber backhaul through its existing municipally owned fiber network.

With Intersection. Project role: deal strategy, commercial terms negotiation and relationship owner with the Mayor of Newark's Office.
MTA Bus Time: Delivering Real-Time Arrival Predictions for 2 Million+ Daily Bus Riders in NYC

In 2011, the New York MTA wanted to provide real-time arrival predictions to its 2 million+ daily bus riders, helping reduce frustration when customers are waiting for the bus.

Two prior efforts from other vendors had struggled with Manhattan's deep urban canyons (affecting GPS) and with fitting into MTA's existing operations. The new approach was designed for both.

New York MTA's internal consulting arm, Strategic Services, believed a new role for MTA (as systems integrator), along with a combination of open source software and (then new) map-matching/machine learning technology, could approach the problem in a different way and succeed where these other efforts had failed.

Jeff, then at OpenPlans, along with Brian Ferris and Kari Watkins of OneBusAway at the University of Washington, deployed a pilot solution on 30 vehicles on one bus route in Brooklyn, NY. Tested over the course of a year+, the solution performed as expected, utilizing existing on-bus hardware designed for fare payment and reducing deployment costs.

Jeff and OpenPlans then partnered with Cambridge Systematics to scale the team and the solution to all 6000+ of MTA's vehicles across all five boroughs, in collaboration with MTA and its on-bus fare payment hardware vendors Cubic and Verifone. Similar to the pilot, the system met and even exceeded expectations, and it is still running at MTA more than a decade later.

With Cambridge Systematics and OpenPlans. Project role: project lead (OpenPlans as subcontractor to CS). Scope included product-based feature prioritization and requirements tracing, front-end user interface design and development, including web, mobile, SMS and signage, as well as the "inference engine" which uses statistical machine learning techniques to match observed vehicles to the schedule.
PA OneClick Kiosks: Improving Access to Transportation To Increase Economic Opportunity for Veterans

A pilot kiosk-based program conducted by PennDOT to connect veterans with transportation and economic opportunity in York, PA.

Thirteen kiosks were placed at key locations around York, each providing referrals to free or reduced-price transportation services, optionally filtered by eligibility criteria. Users could select an option and pickup a phone attached to the kiosk to receive more information or book travel right on the kiosk or, in some cases, book completely electronically via the kiosk. Receipts, tickets and/or a printed list of options were all provided via an integrated receipt printer. Funded by US DOT's Veterans Transportation and Community Living Initiative (VTCLI).

With Cambridge Systematics and Control Group. Project role: product owner and subject matter expert (as subcontractor to CS), responsible for kiosk design and on-kiosk software.
A Trip Planner for the Puget Sound Region

A deployment of OpenTripPlanner for Sound Transit in Seattle, Washington, including a customized web-based front-end built with the OpenGeo stack and a productionalized data pipeline integrated with existing enterprise systems.

With OpenPlans. Project role: project manager and lead software developer.
GigaPan.org: An Online Space To Share Gigapixel+ Panoramic Images of The World

A Flickr-like website to publicly share extremely high resolution (gigapixel+) images, taken by a unique camera rig (shown above) and special software developed in collaboration with NASA's Ames Research Center that, together, give an off-the-shelf, standard camera these special capture capabilities. Spun off from the university and now available via GigaPan Systems.

With CMU's CREATE Lab and DeepLocal. Project role: lead software engineer.
The Knowledge Center: A Digital Workspace to Better Coordinate Emergency/Disaster Response

A web-based decision support and incident response system for emergency responders in Western Pennsylvania (FEMA Region 13).

With SSI Services. Project role: lead software engineer.
MapHub: A Wiki-like Online Map To Promote Inclusive Neighborhood Development

A wiki-like, community-editable geographic information system (GIS) to foster grassroots neighborhood data sharing to encourage more equitable, inclusive neighborhood (re)development in Pittsburgh, PA.

With DeepLocal. Project role: CTO and lead software engineer.

Creative Practice

Alongside client work, Public Works Office is also a creative practice that looks closely at how public systems are planned, run and maintained.

Fast-Tracked: Who Decides Where The Subway Goes?

A 15-week urban investigation, examining the process of extending the 7 Line to Hudson Yards in West Manhattan, asking tough questions about who benefits, what trade-offs were made, who is affected and how.

Students learned about the machinery behind urban planning in New York City such as the ULURP process, as well as the messy details of tax-increment financing (TIF) that funded the extension and the "platform" Hudson Yards is built upon. Students shared their findings in the form of a newspaper presented to the public at the site, along with an installation by artists FriendsWithYou.

In collaboration with students at New Design High School in New York City, The Center for Urban Pedagogy and Alexandra Woolsey-Puffer.
5 Cents: A Local/Express Initiative Along the 4/5/6 Lines in New York City

After introducing its "bonus" program to the MetroCard in 2011, riders of the New York MTA were often left with extra ("bonus") money on their fare media that didn't add up to another ride.

These extra nickels and dimes, in aggregate, added up to real money — upwards of $500 million according to one estimate.

5 Cents: A Local/Express Initiative Along the 4/5/6 Lines was an initiative of PwO to offer a new public service: treating MetroCards like other redeemable containers of value such as aluminum and plastic drink bottles, redeemable for 5 cents in New York State.

PwO traveled the 4/5/6 lines offering riders an opportunity to redeem bottles or cans or empty MetroCards, all in return for 5 cents for each container.

In collaboration with Alexandra Woolsey-Puffer.
walk-shed: A Personal Parisian Arcade Made of Construction Sheds

A custom walking route planner designed to calculate and guide users through as many "sidewalk sheds" as possible in order to avoid sun, rain or other adverse environmental conditions while traveling to their destinations across New York City.

Presented at Conflux 2012 along with PwO's talk titled "Against Efficiency" about the tradeoffs of the logic of optimization.
MapMover: A Robotic Visualization of the Aural Landscape of Pittsburgh

A robotic visualization of the aural landscape of Pittsburgh, collected via MapHub and a custom interactive voice-response (IVR) system based on the open source package Asterisk. Exhibited in Karlsruhe, Germany as part of ZKM's show "Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy" (2005), curated by Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel and Steve Dietz.

With DeepLocal and Greg Baltus. Project role: CTO and lead software engineer. Source code.