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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related, I'm constantly shocked (maybe I shouldn't be anymore) at the tech ineptitude of cities that are supposed to be big tech hubs. I live in Seattle, and my regular tech complaint is we can't get the buses connected to an app that is accurate within +-10 minutes. I know it doesn't sound like much, but how much tech brainpower is here, and why isn't that tech shining more clearly?

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If you are an IT professional in a tech-hub, do you want to work for a bit IT company or for the municipality?

In a similar vein, do you think the municipality wages are competitive with those from the tech companies?

I could see how being a tech-hub would function to draw a lot of talent out of a municipality.

Because the problem isn't tech, but business models. No amount of tech brainpower can help when bus operators think of their schedules as data to be sold instead of given away for free.

At least in Puget Sound, every transit operator (except for Community Transit) makes their real-time bus arrival data publicly available for free via Sound Transit's Open Transit Data service, OneBusAway: https://www.soundtransit.org/Open-Transit-Data

(OneBusAway is the name of the app that shows information to end users and the name of the API service that developers can query.)

I know that this service is widely available and free because I've had an API key for years and have (accidentally) pummeled the service with requests and have heard nary a peep from Sound Transit asking me for money.

Good for you and your city. My hometown apparently made an exclusive deal with a startup, which I hear is why we still can't see bus schedules on Google Maps.

Because private tech companies fight like mad to avoid paying taxes to public city operations? Citizens too, probably. Nobody likes taxes.

And the best/brightest tech workers gravitate to the higher private salaries.

It’s not a technical problem - those are easier.

I live in DC, land of the professional Fed. At the absolute highest level and after adjusting for location, the most a DC Fed could earn is $164,200. No surprise that anyone with serious technical talent--and by extension, market value--doesn't want such a job.

True, but consider some folks are content with a 38 hour week, may have automated large chunks of their job, and find the demands of working for a big public sector organization far less than that of a similar role in a private sector tech company.

If you can manage that, sure, sounds pretty good. But I doubt that's the case most of the time. None of the Feds I've had the chance to talk to sound like they're slacking off.

This is something I argue with myself a lot about. I work as a software engineer for a large non-tech company. They pay well, but I could easily go to a tech company and make 20% more. Except...well, in 18 months I've never had to work more than a 40 hour week. I can totally see the appeal of a government job.

Have you used the OneBusAway app? It's accurate for the buses I take. Is it inaccurate for your routes?

OBA, Transit, Apple Maps, and King County Trip Planner all use the same back end data sources (though Transit adds users who are volunteering their location with the Go feature in its app) so they should all be similar to each other.

Ever since the major overhaul of data in mid-2015 that tried to fix the "ghost bus" problem (a bus would show as being on the wrong trip pair) and the "never-ending terminal" problem (arrival times for stops very near a route's terminal would show as many minutes delayed or early until the bus actually started moving), I've been quite pleased with the quality of real-time data.

There are always going to be inaccuracies, though. At peak, Sound Transit / OneBusAway are trying to track a couple thousand vehicles across many miles in unpredictable traffic and weather. That it works at all is a minor miracle in my eyes.

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