BART adds Developer App Center to bart.gov
One theme I noticed in the BART Mobile Applications Rider Survey results was that some respondents didn’t seem to be aware of the many 3rd party apps available for real-time alerts and trip planning on the BART system.
In an effort to help riders find the available tools, BART has provided links to many of the mobile and social apps available for their system through bart.gov’s Developer App Center.
One question I have, though, is why it’s called the Developer App Center. That makes it sound like it’s for developers, instead of end-users.
iGov: How geeks are opening up government on the Web
Thanks for the alert from Joe Hughes on the transit developers email list.
The Atlantic Monthly just published a good article about open government and transit data sharing, including a well-deserved shout- out to Tim Moore’s efforts at BART (along with TransitCampBayArea and the iBART guys).
Joe
iGov: How geeks are opening up government on the Web by Douglas McGray
Barack Obama has said we need a “Google for government.” It’s a nice line, but what does it mean? Federal agencies have been online since the mid-’90s. Obama’s first crack at a Google-for-government law led to USAspending.gov, a budget tracker that looked like everything else the feds had put up on the Web—until I saw one geek-speak phrase on the home page, so small I almost missed it: API Documentation. To understand its significance, let me tell you how I got subway schedules on my iPhone.
Just a few days after Apple’s iPhone launched, a trip planner for the San Francisco Bay Area’s subway system, BART, appeared in the iTunes application store, which sells iPhone and iPod software for download. User reviews were mixed. But I was still floored. How could a local government agency move so quickly?
Turns out, it didn’t. 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.”
A couple weeks after that first BART application appeared, a new trip planner went live. This one, called iBART, was a thing of beauty. Free, too. It was written by two former high-school buddies—Ian Leighton, a sophomore at UC Berkeley, and David Hodge, a sophomore at the University of Southern California. Forty thousand people downloaded the program in just a few weeks.
“We’ve created competition among developers,” Moore said, “to see who can serve our customers best.”
Trillium work in talk on transit data future
The Trillium-developed Redwood Transit System website and its use of Google Transit was featured in the updated version of a presentation the Portland TriMet CTO gave at APTA’s TransITech conference. See “Leveraging resources for customer information by exposing transit data” below.
The TriMet presentation about how TriMet has benefited from sharing their data with, and actively reaching out to, developers, and encouraging other transit agencies to do the same. This will make transit information more available, and tools for accessing and manipulating it less expensive and easier to use.
