- The game would be probably to provide some kind of standard or API that would make all those independant providers rally accross a common model. Would save communities cost & improve the service. Probably a big market.
- If you look outside of the US, public transit (in some form or the other) is for wealthy people as well. Think Japan & Europe.
This common specification already exists. It is called GTFS [1] (General Transit Feed Specification) and can be used to exchange static transit data. There is also GTFS-realtime [2], an extension to GTFS, to be used to exchange realtime transit data.
The specification was designed through a partnership of the initial Live Transit Updates partner agencies, a number of transit developers and Google. The specification was introduced and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license in August 2011.
[1] https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/ [2] https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime/
The TransXChange schema guide is a 300+ page PDF [3], so there is a big barrier to entry.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmodel [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransXChange [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Interface_for_Real_Time... [3] http://81.17.70.199/transxchange/schema/2.5/doc/TransXChange...