Headway

Update (3/5/08): TriMet sent me an updated version of the presentation; I’ve updated the version embedded on this page, or you can download the PDF.

Earlier today at the APTA TransITech conference, TriMet’s Tim McHugh gave a heartening talk about their experiences with making their raw schedules and and real-time information available to developers. Here are the slides:

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Since you don’t get to hear the spoken half of the talk, here are a few points that he made that aren’t in the slides:

• Riders always want more ways of accessing transit information, but TriMet has limited development cycles; releasing schedule feeds and APIs is way to allow outside developers to close the gap.
• Chances are, outside developers are already scraping your transit site anyway, so why not give them a less error-prone direct feed of the information?
• In the future, they plan to release an API to their trip planner.
• Since they’ve launched their developer site, they’ve only received positive feedback on the resources; there’s been no negative impact on them from doing this!

The significance of this talk lay partly in the audience of technical staff from other agencies and transit vendors–this is the strongest endorsement that I’ve ever seen from an agency of the virtues of working with outside developers. In time, I hope that stories like TriMet’s will convince other agencies that they have much more to gain than they have to lose by sharing their data.

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:

Bus stops are shown alongside driving directions.

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

…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.

Last month, Portland, Oregon’s TriMet agency became one of the first transit agencies to open a dedicated site for third-party users of their data. This site (along with BART’s GTFS page) marks a milestone for the transit field, demonstrating that agencies are starting to understand the benefits of sharing their data with outside developers.

To be fair to the folks at TriMet, they’ve been making this information available more unofficially, on request, for quite some time now. However, it’s significant that they’ve chosen to invest the time to publish a dedicated site with the necessary CYA legal text and API key mechanisms; it will no doubt encourage developers who weren’t previously aware of TriMet’s forward-looking stance on data sharing.

Right now, TriMet is providing the following:

• Their entire schedule in Google Transit Feed Spec format, the open format used by Google Transit, Graphserver, PolyTransit, and others.
• Arrival estimates by stop (example)
• The current set of detours by route (example)
• Listings of routes and stops to enumerate the parameters for the other services (example 1, example 2)

They’re off to a great start. Applying for an API key is painless (I got mine within 5 minutes of signing up), and the fact that the services are in REST form makes it easy to experiment with them by just typing in different URLs. (Still, it would be nice to have more sample queries, or perhaps even an interactive web form, to demonstrate the expected query parameters and corresponding output before even having to sign up.)

Congratulations to TriMet on their launch—I’m looking forward to seeing what creative uses developers will have for these offerings!

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).