Xconomy has a
lengthy yet compelling writeup about the democratization of transit information - and Google's role therein.
The file format that Google invented in 2006 to make all this possible, called GTFS, has become the de facto world standard for sharing transit data. And now Google is pushing a related standard that enables agencies to alert riders about service delays in real time—thus answering that age-old question, “When’s my bus coming?” So far, Google is displaying these live transit updates for only four U.S. cities (Boston, Portland, OR, San Diego, and San Francisco) and two European cities (Madrid, Spain, and Turin, Italy). But it hopes to add many, many more.
The part I find fascinating is that people
still want to hoard information, completely explaining why it took
so long for this information to become available in NY and DC, two cities that I spend quite some time in
The rise of GTFS has also helped to spur a larger “open government data” movement that cuts across areas like healthcare, energy, and education. And at transit agencies that were initially slow to publish their route and schedule information in digital form, including New York City’s MTA and Washington, D.C.’s Metro system, it has created irresistible pressure to open the data vaults and cooperate with outside developers.
Mind you, this has little to do with "Information wants to be free", etc. etc. Public transit is a classic example of
increasing returns, i.e., the more people that use it, the more relevant and useful (and cost-effective!) it is. Similarly, the meta-data around public transit - schedules, routes, outages - is
exactly the type of information that you want people to have widespread and trivial access to, something that can be best achieved by minimizing barriers to adoption - a classic win-win situation. Probably something that became apparent to the fine folks in NY/DC eventually :-)
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