Liberating Transit Data
In the fight to liberate government data, Washington, DC is a leader. The current Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the US, Vivek Kundra, was recruited from his position as the CIO of DC for doing an awesome job. One of his more successful projects was starting Apps for Democracy. This national apps contest challenged the private and civic sectors to build applications and tools off of government data.
I bring up Apps for Democracy because last week at Digital Capital Week — the so called SXSW of the mid-atlantic — I listened to Bryan Sivak (who filled Kundra’s shoes as DC’s new CIO) speak about how the DC’s local government is opening up even more public data. Now you can access information on the municipal run Circulator buses. (The metro and other bus systems are run under the transportation authority WMATA.) Check out the Chief Technology Officer’s labs page here to see the data for yourself.
Looking at this page, I was reminded about the transformative role Google has played in making transit data public. Having helped design common (open) technological standards, Google empowered developers to build Android and iPhone Apps, mash-ups, and of course improved Google Maps.
The DC government provides Circulator data in three different formats: KML, GTFS, and CSV. A KML file is the file format used for Google Earth, originally invented by Keyhole, Inc. (which was purchased by Google in 2004). GTFS or General Transit Feed Specification format was originally called the Google Transit Feed Specification and only went public in 2008. CSV files in the transit database provide additional information and weekly updates with GPS data points of every city bus every 15 seconds.
Google’s specifications have made releasing transit information easier than ever before, and both (the KML and GTFS) are essentially open file formats. The Open Geospatial Consortium has given its seal of approval to KML, and GTFS was released with open-source editing tools.
Transit data is essential public information that empowers anyone armed with wifi or a smart phone to control their travel from beginning to end: knowing when and where to arrive for transit and how long it will take to get to a destination gives a person an incredible amount of agency. Although I’d like to see more file formats like OSM for Open Street Map or more information like the GPS located CSV data, the important thing is to just get the data out there. And for all its successes, there’s a lot more DC could be doing on this end. Last week techPresident reported that London is setting up its own apps challenge — and that they released all of their transit data. Liberating this data is a global challenge, but one we can be active in. Check out the GTFS exchange website to see if you should be contacting your local transit authority.
