Arlington releases open transit data, on Google soon

Transit

Arlington releases open transit data, on Google soon

by Michael Perkins and David Alpert • April 13, 2010 3:50 pm

Arlington has released their ART bus route and schedule information in the open GTFS format, joining Alexandria's DASH and DC's Circulator in offering their schedule information to developers and Google for use in route-finding applications.

Photo by Arlington County.

According to Arlington County, they have ~~signed the partnership agreement with Google, which means that riders should be able to plan their trips on the ART bus service using Google Maps shortly.~~ contacted Google about inclusion in Google Maps, but must still work through an agreement before riders can plan their trips on the ART bus service using Google Maps.

The feed is here, and Arlington has set up an RSS feed for developers to receive notifications about updates to the data.

WMATA also offers the data and an RSS feed, but hasn't worked out an agreement with Google. Last we heard, WMATA and Google were negotiating over the details of the contracts. In response to inquiries, WMATA spokesperson Doug Karas said that "Discussions are moving forward."

6 comments

Tags: Arlington, data openness, Google, GTFS, WMATA

WMATA, ART close to Google Transit participation (Feb 25, 2010)
Metro "punts": Will release transit schedule data for Google and others (Mar 11, 2009)
Fairfax County reluctant to release open transit data (Jun 17, 2010)
Where's Google Transit? (Jul 20, 2009)
Google and WMATA signed Google Transit agreement in July (Jan 27, 2011)

Michael Perkins blogs here and at Infosnack about Metro operations and fares, performance parking, and any other government and economics information he finds on the Web. He lives with his wife and two children in Arlington, Virginia.

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington. He has had a lifelong interest in great cities and great communities. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.

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Another reason to like Arlington and ART.

by Penny Everline on Apr 13, 2010 4:07 pm

Any sense on opening up WMATA NextBus feeds?

by HM on Apr 13, 2010 5:00 pm

@HM: There isn't really a spec for how to do this (though I'd love to see one written using XML output and HTTP GET requests like with Chicago)

Hard for us to push WMATA to do so if we can't agree that the data should be published [like this], which is the way everyone else does it (like we can with GTFS).

by Michael Perkins on Apr 13, 2010 5:46 pm

Parse-able RSS feed is good enough for most of us, right? Somehow, they've got it working on the Chumby. Without digging deeper into what they've done, the only method I can think of is screen-scraping from the web page.

by HM on Apr 14, 2010 11:09 am

I was thinking about doing that for the rail real-time data.

by Michael Perkins on Apr 14, 2010 11:17 am

Metrorail? Yes, that would be a logical way to get to a display of real-time arrival data displayed on something that's not a computer screen. Cross your fingers that they don't add captchas or find some other way to to foil you. In that sense, this is a great personal hobby, but I wouldn't want to be maintaining a public-facing display based on scrapes. My wife blames me when the DVR fails to record one of her shows.

But if they had this, I'd show WMATA how we had a ghost D6 this morning. I counted upwards of 15 people at 3 stops waiting for a bus that went off the radar 5 minutes before it was supposed to show up.

by HM on Apr 14, 2010 12:53 pm