One of the most exciting talks that I saw at last week’s APTA TransITech conference was Frank Purcell of TriMet’s talk about TimeTable Publisher. (I don’t have a link for that presentation yet, but here’s a PDF of his talk at GOSCON 2006.)

TimeTable Publisher is an application that TriMet developed in-house for turning their schedule data into user facing print and web timetables. The app is intended to be used by the agency’s marketing department, and as a result, it’s strongly oriented towards making decisions about how much schedule information is the right amount to present to users.

After importing the schedule data, the user can add or remove timepoints for particular lines, and can also set up footnotes for schedule entries. Once the schedule preview looks right, the user can automatically generate updated HTML and PDF schedules for the web, as well as InDesign XML for the fancy print schedules. To make it easier to figure out whether the print schedules for a given route need to be updated, the application allows the user to compare two service dates to see which routes have changed significantly.

This application is exciting because it’s one of the first instances of a transit agency making an in-house tool available for other agencies and interested parties. Being able to re-use this work means that an agency can get good results without spending as many of those precious operating dollars. Since it accepts data in Google Transit Feed format, any agency that’s participating in Google Transit can use this tool with minimal effort. For that matter, since the Google spec is an open standard, anyone who cobbles together a feed (for whatever purpose) can use it.

I should mention that the source for TimeTable Publisher isn’t publicly available yet—I gather that the TriMet folks are still tidying and vetting the (Java) code. However, they hope that it will be generally available in the next few months (and if you’re from an interested transit agency, I suspect they’d be willing to let you work with pre-release code).

Hopefully this is a sign of things to come, and we’ll see more shareable tools as more and more data is made available in standard formats!

Disclosure: I was attending TransITech on behalf of Google Transit, but as always, this post reflects my personal opinion.

Update (3/11/2007): Here’s Frank’s TransITech presentation (PDF). These slides show a lot more of the user interface of the app.