Jaap Weel’s recent posts about data sharing in public transit are worth a read. Here are some excerpts:

Dutch transit data locked up

Under traditional (and current American) copyright law, public transit timetables cannot be copyrighted (IANAL, but I’m fairly sure of this). With the European database directive (the one that was supposed to stimulate the knowledge economy and bladiblah), though, it is probably true that REISinformatiegroep can indeed control the timetable data, not only by refusing to provide it to Google and others in easily readable form, but also by suing you if you try to extract it from publicly available timetable books or web sites. One guy who tried to run “spoorboekje.nl” to provide an alternative to the heavyrail trip planner at ns.nl, which was not accessible to the disabled or to Linux users at the time, got nastygrammed into shutting it down.

Open transit data is good for transit agencies

Making transit data accessible means that the agencies can get trip planners, integrated with cell phones, portable navigation devices and other gizmos, accessible to the disabled, easy to use, and so on, all without lifting a finger. This saves them the cost of having to develop these things, which can be quite high and distracting from core business, and at the same time they get more real, paying customers for the service that they were set up to provide in the first place, viz. transit. This should also be especially interesting for for-profit transit companies such as Greyhound and Eurolines that have to compete with subsidized train and bus services.

Transit agencies and operators should think of third-party transit efforts as extremely cost-effective marketing and outreach programs, since the marginal cost of each new effort is practically zero (particularly if the agency is exporting their schedule data in a well-known format).