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Comment by darklajid | Hacker News Reader

Amazing.

Unfortunately it makes me sad to see so nice ways of using the public transport data - and having it not available everywhere where I'd care.

In Cologne/DE I actually sent mails and calls to a bunch of contact addresses (both technical and marketing/customer service) and tried to get access to similar data for the bus and subway lines. They .. don't get it. Open data seems to be scary..

Well done, this project is technically interesting and looks decent enough to sit in a room that is partially controlled by my SO _and_ it's useful. Full points.

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The MBTA in Boston MA opened up their real-time feed to developers 2 years ago. I entered a moving clock face that provides "glancable" bus arrival times in a contest they had and won!

http://groups.google.com/group/massdotdevelopers/msg/7cab0ae...

I never produced more than the one prototype. Maybe I should do a kickstarter to see how many people would want one.

Open Data is scary and can vastly undermine the companies - most of European public transport is done by public tenders. You want to be able to provide what's required as cheaply as possible. That means as few busses and more important as few drivers as possible (labor costs are the highest). If the contract is up for grabs and your competitor can see how many busses you need at any given time for instance, that means a tremendous win. Sure it's still a bad argument, but there is some say for threatening their business.

Here in the Netherlands lots of the tenders/contracts contain provisions for providing the data to "regional or national transport planning systems", which is a very vague stipulation, and it's still hard to get data providers to provide the data.

A great site for GTFS based data (maybe including your city?) is http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/. Use data from it and https://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner/wiki/ to build a trip planner for your city in an hour.

Wouldn't open data make a bus company more popular to another one that does not release its data to the public? But here in Colone there is only one bus company, which might be the reasons why there is no public API---why put extra effort if there is no competition?

This article last week highlights how research in Chicago has shown that publishing live data and releasing an API has increased ridership: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/03/do-real-tim...

We only got this late last year in London. They have had the data for years for displaying arrivals times at selected stops. I think they selling point might be that tourists use apps to help them get around and will use buses more if they can understand them. Buses are always confusing when visiting places.

Similar problem in Vienna/Austria. They actually used to make their data available upon request, which meant proper Google Maps integration, etc. Via some backroom deal, the data is now only available to one company which has done a terrible job of putting user interfaces (mobile apps, web site) on it.

Have a look at the Öffi Android app: http://oeffi.schildbach.de/

That guy somehow figured out how to get the data for a lot of cities, Cologne being one of them. Maybe he knows how to get it.

As far as i know he just parses the websites of the different public transportation services.

Some of the techies behind those sites were kind enough to provide him with a url parameter so they know where the spike in traffic comes from.

In addition, all he got is the non-live data. In the article the live data from every bus station is used.

Actually, fyi, the company that is responsible for most of the schedules and time tables is hacon, and the system they offer is called hafas. If you search for the term, you'll find that many, if not most, european transportation providers rely on them for their services. That's why I can search for a train in suburban france using my deutsche bahn-iphone app. it would only be a matter of understanding that one api and the data would be open ( without any screen-scraping or other hacks involved ).

A friend of mine started to reverse engineer the API, that the DB-Navigator App uses, as it covers pretty much every public transport in Germany and at least trains (and sometimes trams and buses) in all of Europe. It can even give you a route to Pjönyang, North Korea. I don't know how successful he has, though.

Same here in Italy. They're just starting now to understand that OpenData is the way to go, but it's a looong road. I know that there's also a European multi year program, I hope something will happen..

ps Great hack John!

I just wrote to a bunch of addresses in the Frankfurt/DE area, asking for that kind of data. I hope i'll get more response than you did.

We emailed them (in London) for access to this data some time back. We were told that the powers that be wanted to create their own services first (before opening the data to the public), the main one of which, unbelievably, was to be a "text for your bus time" type service.

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