URISA and the University of South Florida’s National Center for Transit Research at the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) are pleased to feature two keynote speakers for the 2011 GIS in Public Transportation Conference, which will take place at the Hilton Bayfront in St. Petersburg, Florida, September 13-15, 2011.

The opening keynote address on the morning of September 14 is Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America.

Against the backdrop of rising gas prices, growing suburban poverty, continued sprawl and uneven transit availability in cities and suburbs, the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution has completed a first-of-its-kind analysis that shows how transit systems link workers to jobs in metropolitan America. The analysis covers 371 transit agencies in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, and provides information that can inform critical policy and investment decisions at a time of scarce public and private resources.

The general session keynote address on September 15 is Open Trip Planner: Open Source Multimodal Trip Planner.

The OpenTripPlanner (OTP) project is an international effort to create a flagship open source platform for multimodal trip planning and analysis. As free and open source software, OTP can be freely downloaded, deployed, and modified by anyone, and is optimized for use with open data sources and standards such as OpenStreetMap for base network data and the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) for transit system data. OTP was established in the summer of 2009 to bring together a number of previously independent open source trip planning projects into a unified effort, and the project and its associated development community have since grown rapidly. In addition to the United States, there are now live OTP deployments in Canada, Poland, India, Spain, Ireland, and Israel. Later this fall, Portland's TriMet will formally launch a beta trip planning application built entirely on the OpenTripPlanner platform and open data sources, marking the first official deployment of a fully open source / open data trip planner by a major U.S. transit agency. This keynote session will provide an overview of OTP's history and current capabilities, including live demos, as well as a roadmap for development of the project going forward.

A poster session (still accepting submissions), exhibition and networking events round out the conference experience. Registration and hotel discounts are available through the end of August. For complete conference, exhibits, travel and registration information, visit http://www.urisa.org/gis_transit today!