Finally.  A reason to look at another city’s transit system and say, “well at least our transit system isn’t the only one.” In this case, the DC Metro is confounding its riders, transit advocates and tech geeks with its refusal to release its schedule information so that Google Transit and amateur app developers can use it to make that information more readily available.

You may recall that several months ago, a couple of tech-savvy SEPTA riders with a little bit of time on their hands and access to SEPTA’s schedule information on-line created iSEPTA.  For those of you without an iPhone, you can give it a try at your computer.  Unfortunately, it only works with regional rail so far but it wouldn’t take much of an effort to get the whole system on there.  The developers did as much as they could with the information available to them.  Since SEPTA apparently hasn’t signed on with Google Transit, and doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to do so, iSEPTA and SEPTA.org’s difficult to decipher trip planner are our only options.

Contrast our favorite transit agency with One city that is doing it well is San Francisco.  Greater, Greater Washington points out an article in The Atlantic about how San Fran’s BART system and its open source attitude:

In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data in a simple, standard, open format—a text file, basically, with a bunch of numbers separated by commas—so Google Maps could generate bus and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for any platform.

“It’s not 1995,” BART’s Web-site manager, Timothy Moore, explained. “A single Web site is not the endgame anymore. People are planning trips on Google, they’re using their iPhones. Because we opened up our schedule, we are in those places.”

The experience of BART shows that when transit information is freely released to the public there’s almost a competition to see who can come up with the coolest apps.  And the best part: it doesn’t cost the transit agency a penny to develop the app.

So, Metro Riders, I feel your pain.  In fact, for fun I entered my work location on Independence Mall to get transit directions to my home location in South Philly.  Google Transit actually advises me to walk to 8th and Market, hop on New Jersey’s PATCO to 12th and Locust (a two-minute trip) and then walk 25 minutes home:

I know there's another transit system in there somewhere

So anyone who would like to use Google Transit to get around Philly has that option, as long as they’re only traveling somewhere near 8th and Market to 16th and Locust.  Very useful.