There are a few standards floating around for transit. One is put out by APTA, the transit people. Several years in dev and nobody (to my knowledge) uses it. The GT spec was meant to be dead simple, but that also limits how broadly it can be used.
I was at GOSCON in Portland a few weeks ago and followed the transit track (sorry for the pun). There is an open source scheduler in development, and TriMet is really driving much of this. However, the real issue is the TAs themselves--they are fiefdoms of institutional knowledge and bureaucracy and don't have much of an interest in changing--TriMet is more the exception. We've been working (and trying to work) with TAs to get their raw data, standardize and distribute--let's just say saying 'please' isn't the best way to make something happen. This also gets tied up in the geodata ownership discussion--in the US much of this is taxpayer financed, but not completely so, as many transit systems are authorities, which can float their own bonds, so they are a step removed/insulated. Even so, nobody owns the departure time of a train, these authorities (supposedly) serve the public interest which would mean increasing ridership, but yes and no... UMI is focusing on this, and I am personally obsessed. the national security argument has come into play with about 95% of the TAs I speak with--they know it's a shield, but it is one that allows them to keep 9-5 hours. Again, generally...I don't mean to poo-poo the world of public transit, but the idea of any agency talking to another wasn't even conceived of until a few years ago. ian Ian White :: Urban Mapping, Inc 690 Fifth Street Suite 200 :: San Francisco CA 94107 T 415.946.8170 :: F 866.385.8266 :: www.urbanmapping.com ----- Original Message ----- From: Daniel Haran <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, November 2, 2006 6:09:08 AM GMT-0800 US/Pacific Subject: [Geowanking] oss route planner? google transit data? => Is anyone here working on an OSS route planner? This is old news now, but I haven't seen it discussed here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/happy-trails-with-google-transit.html Google Transit is actively adding cities, and asking for transit data from other cities. Cities don't have to pay anything beyond the cost of transforming their data to Google's format - which is under a Creative Commons. There are still some bugs, and GT sometimes suggest you walk on water: http://google.com/transit?f=q&hl=en&time=&date=&ttype=&q=930+nw+25th+pl+97210+to+4747+n+channel+ave+97217+8+am&ie=UTF8&z=13&om=1 The more competition in this area, the better. Already, GT is kicking some serious butt on UI alone. Is there any open source competition? I'm assuming Google's data format, being CC, will become the de facto standard for open source work. Does anyone have data in this format? Daniel. _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
