Open data and transit agencies
Monday, 31 August 2009
Last week, Rafe Needleman at CNET had an interesting article on open data and transit agencies. The long and the short of it is that while some agencies (such as our own TriMet and San Francisco’s Muni) are at the forefront of making their data available to the public, other agencies are going the opposite direction, locking down data under the pretense of copyright:
According to StationStops developer Chris Schoenfeld, the MTA claims that the StationStops iPhone app (not the Web site) infringes on MTA intellectual property… MTA, he says, was asking for royalties on use of the data in arrears, at a price that would basically drive him out of business as an app developer in the category.
Even more amusing, MTA said that if they agreed to let the developer use their operational data, they’d send it to him. On a compact disk. After receiving a request. A paper request. Apparently the MTA thinks we all still live in 1985.
This issue of transit agencies being jealous of their data is one that never made sense to me, and first came to my notice back when Washington DC”s Metro system shut the door on Google Transit. Me, I’m still trying to figure out how it is that riders get a quality or improved transit experience by having less convenient access to data.
It may be worse than just hampering ridership convenience, however. As Michael Malone recently put it on a broadcast of Smart City Radio, cities (and this goes for the transit agencies that are inexorably tied to the as well) “are [now] an aggregator” of data. The distribution of information is a key role of urban areas. I would argue further that if a city (or a transit agency) makes it more difficult to access information, that will make that city (or transit agency) less attractive as a place to live.
