One of the biggest benefits of transit agencies making their raw schedule data publicly available, as TriMet and others have done, is that riders are free to do interesting things with the information that the agency itself might not have thought of or have taken the time to do themselves.

Case in point: Brett Warden in Portland is using TriMet’s GTFS feed to create a POI (points of interest) file for his dashboard-mounted GPS. This means that the very latest TriMet stop data now forms a clickable layer on his Garmin StreetPilot c580. Here are a few screenshots:

TriMet bus stops on the map
Bus stops are shown alongside driving directions.

Clickable stop icons
Stop icons on the GPS map can be clicked on to show…

Stop details
…the stop name and description, into which Brett has packed the stop ID, fare zone, and lines serving that stop.

Brett told me how he got started on the project:

At first I saw a POI collection, made by hand, of
all TriMet’s light rail stops. That got me thinking — if they made
the data available to Google, maybe they’d let me see it too, and make
a comprehensive map of ALL transit stops. They responded, and pointed
me to the GTFS developer site… by far the easiest experience I’ve
had getting information from a public agency.

To generate the file, he imports the GTFS feed into an SQLite DB and runs a few simple queries to generate the POI file. He plans to post the code soon, which will allow it to be used with other agencies’ GTFS feeds. In the meantime, the resulting TriMet stops POI file is available on the POI Factory site.