6 Comments

1. Toronto is getting online with Google Transit? That is great. Municipalities generally move as fast as glaciers when it comes to opening up data. So much information is tied up in archaic interfaces and protocols that would be a decade obsolete in the private sector.

   My favourite anecdote along these lines is Stamen’s Oakland Crimespotting. Stamen could not get information directly from the Oakland police department so they datascraped from Oakland Crimewatch – which after several months started registering this process as a server attack. Crimespotting was shut down for several months while Stamen negotiated a data agreement with this municipal web service.

   Innovation is almost always a “bottom-up” process so it is great to hear about these kind of initiatives even being discussed at a municipal level.

   Comment by Greg J. Smith — December 1, 2008 @ 1:07 pm

2. We should be careful what we wish for. Google Transit is no doubt great.

   But let’s make sure that what the TTC does is publish its data in an open standard that Google Transit (and anyone else) is able to use — and that the other GTA transit systems publish their data using the same standard.

   Simply working with Google Transit, and not making the data generally available, would not put them much further ahead.

   Comment by Disparishun — December 1, 2008 @ 3:21 pm

3. Thanks for commenting. The issue of data scraping was in my mind when writing this post.

   My question: “What information is needed by citizen and community-based groups like myttc.ca to continue to innovate and build from the community level up?” should have probably also specified that I am interested in community access to data.

   Quite honestly, I don’t know how usable the data format required by Google Transit is for other mashup masterminds or community groups! I look forward to learning more on this.

   Comment by Karen Smith — December 1, 2008 @ 4:13 pm

4. I agree with Disparishun, it is one thing to collaborate with Google Transit, it is quite another to embrace the philosophy and practices of open data and civic access. Our friends at MyTTC.ca would no doubt like to be treated with the same data access that Google will eventually get from the TTC. And the whole city and the users of the TTC would benefit.

   As for Karen’s other points, Metrolinx should be incorporating this notion of open data standards and civic access into the standards for all local operators. This would allow for not only interoperability of the various systems’ data, but would also allow for ever more interesting citizen-developed innovations that the operators can support, adopt and/or learn from.

   The TO Web 2.0 Summit was a good start to this conversation, but it needs a lot of follow-up and engagement with the web community and citizens of all interests. I posted my thoughts on the summit and Mark Surman’s talk on my blog: “A city that thinks like the web”.

   Comment by Mark Kuznicki — December 1, 2008 @ 4:14 pm

5. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of the data is produced using proprietary programs, such as Trapeze, which is pretty much used by every transit organization to schedule their vehicles. However, Trapeze has made a solution to their customers to export their data to Google Transit, and perhaps this is what the TTC is now employing to deploy their data to Google:

   http://www.trapezegroup.com/solutions/pt_google.php

   Comment by Laurence Lui — December 1, 2008 @ 4:27 pm

6. I find the city’s willingness to work with third parties like Google very admirable. As Mark Surman has no doubt been pushing, being open with data allows the community to dream up implementations that TTC committees could never dream up on their own. The willingness to share must overcome their fear of losing control.

   Three years ago we spoke to the developer at Google that created Google Transit. He said all they needed was the data. The specification is open and anyone could technically scrape the TTC site and re-purpose it. http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html

   We had several meetings before Transit Camp in which the concept of scraping came up but it was a rather daunting task for our spare time. The worry was that all this effort would go into building the system and the TTC site, as it has, would change and we’d be out of luck.

   At Transit Camp it was suggested the TTC use Google for their trip planning software, but we were informed it wouldn’t work as Google didn’t always provide the optimal route. I think the TTC will find that there is almost no route planning software that will find the optimal route. In the end they opened a bid for their own route planning software, which in my opinion is a losing game. I don’t know how the development of the route planning software is going but unless it’s built on top of an existing product I wouldn’t hold your breath.

   Kieran and team at MyTTC have done a great job. I don’t know how their route planner has fared in light of the recent TTC website changes but I give them full points for their efforts.

   In the end the TTC may continually lag behind in leading edge route planning technology. We’re already pining for real-time route data, as well serviced routes are not the issue. The TTC needs to increase off-peak usage to decrease the subsidy gap on all their lines. Hopefully real-time updates would encourage travelers to wait for a streetcar if they knew it was coming in five minutes. There have been many times I’ve opted for a cab in sub-zero temperatures when I could have waited inside 15 more minutes until the streetcar came.

   The TTC doesn’t need to build the tools, it just needs to make the data platform available. I’m not sure if there is a technologist with enough control at the TTC to open up the data to allow this to happen.

   Comment by Michael Glenn — December 1, 2008 @ 4:42 pm

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