Introducing CityGoRound.org

[Brandon Martin-Anderson]

Hey transit dev-folk,

Open transit data has come a long, long way in the last two years.
Several world-class agencies, including Los Angeles Metro, San
Francisco Muni, Washington Metro, and the Massachusetts Bay Transit
Authority, representing over 8 billion passenger miles served
annually, have gone on the record as publicly supporting and
publishing open data.

That's the good news. Here's the bad news - The New York MTA,
including the subway, the bus system, and the long island railroad,
which serve nearly 16 billion passenger miles per year combined, are
completely closed. Out of the 757-odd transit agencies in the national
transit database, 677 agencies do not publish open data. The push for
open data has started strong, but there's a lot of work left to do.

We here at Front Seat have been working on a site which advocates for
open transit data by showing transit riders and transit agencies all
the goodness that comes of opening up. It started as "opentransitdata"
but ended up with a much more catchy name - CityGoRound. The idea is
to provide a searchable directory of all transit apps and other
interesting innovations built on open data. We also keep track of
every transit agency, and whether they're publishing open data or not.
If the user searches for apps in an open district like San Francisco,
they get a bunch of awesome apps. If a user searches for transit apps
in an area where the transit agency does not publish open data, then
the user sees a big fat Fail and is encouraged to pass on their
dissatisfaction to the transit agency in question.

Here's where you all come in: we need to add all your apps. We figure
there's hundreds of 'em, and we want them all. The site is here, with
a temporary HTTPAuth password protection:

http://www.citygoround.org/
username: transit
password: appsnearyou

A few notes:
(1) We want to get the app directory filled up before we go telling
the general public, so please hold off on blogging about it until next
week.
(2) If your app is already in there, go ahead and re-enter it and
we'll delete our duplicate.
(3) There's a five-star rating system for apps. Please use it. We need
to populate those ratings.
(4) The whole thing is open source, hosted on github.

Finally, of course, we would love your feedback.

Happy apping,
Brandon

[Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock]

Excerpts from Brandon Martin-Anderson's message of Wed Dec 02 15:42:23 -0500 2009:

Looks great, Brandon. Nice work! This looks like it'll be a valuable resource,
both for riders looking to find cool apps and for advocates trying to open up
more data sets.

A couple notes:

1. For agencies that haven't opened up their data, it'd be nice to have an
optional link/blurb letting people know about any efforts already underway to
open up those data sets. E.g., (shameless plug), in New York, I've been working
with the NY Open Transit Data meetup (http://nytransitdata.org), and some sort
of notice letting people know that there's an active effort they could join up
with would be excellent.

2. You might want to be more liberal in how you compute "nearness" for transit
agencies. For example, I tried 19010 (a suburb of Philadelpha), and didn't see
SEPTA listed, though it serves that area and has recently released GTFS
(septa.org/developer). (Actually, after looking further, it seems like SEPTA
hasn't been added to the site.)

Again, great work, and thanks for putting this together!

-Nick

>
> Happy apping,
> Brandon
>

[Tommy B Goode]

SEPTA released GTFS a while ago, but it is out of date already, and
does not include the bus data that appeared on Google Maps just a day
or two ago. I'm optimistic that they will get it done of course.

> --
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Transit Developers" group.
> To post to this group, send email to transit-d...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to transit-develop...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers?hl=en.
>
>
>



--
Tom Boutell

http://www.tommybgoode.com/
http://boutell.livejournal.com/

[Michael Fagan]

good to see it. I'd like to see other places (*cough* Canada) in there
too :-)

[Jehiah Czebotar]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Michael Fagan <mfa...@gmail.com> wrote:
> good to see it. I'd like to see other places (*cough* Canada) in there
> too :-)

do you know of a good complete list of transit agencies (and points of
contact) for Canada? without that it's difficult to do.

--
Jehiah

[Matt Lerner]

We were able to seed City-Go-Round with a list of US transit agencies from: http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/

We'd love to see City-Go-Round work in other countries and the site already has some intl support.  E.G.
http://www.citygoround.org/agencies/ca/

As a teeny step in this direction, we're going to add a country dropdown to the all agencies list:
http://github.com/bmander/citygoround/issues/#issue/31

We'd love someone to join the github project and find a way to upload a bunch of agencies from other countries!

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Transit Developers" group.
To post to this group, send email to transit-d...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to transit-develop...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers?hl=en.

--

Follow me: http://twitter.com/mrlerner

[T Sobota]

Under Agencies... the column "Real Time Data" is somewhat vague,
although the intent can be readily assumed. Our system has real-time
data (via a proprietary web service from our CAD/AVL vendor), but no
established/open way to access it.

[Brandon Martin-Anderson]

You're right - we should say "publishes AVL data" or something.

-B

[Brandon Martin-Anderson]

The site is actually pretty internationalized - there's very little
code in the system that's US-specific. Check it out:

http://www.citygoround.org/agencies/ca/

-B

[S.M.Sabri S.M.Ismail]

Hi Matt,

Would love to add transit agencies in MY, and maybe SG too.
But didn't quite see how to, even after some browsing of www.citygoround.org and github.com.

I note LTA SG transit data already on Google Maps, not sure they published their GTFS yet.
Hopefully RapidKL MY transit data will be on Google Maps and publishing GTFS not much later than 1Q next year.

regards,
sabre23t =^.^=

[Matt Lerner]

If you upload feeds to the GTFS Data Exchange then City-Go-Round will automatically pick them up.  We sync with GTFS Exchange once per day.

If you wanted to upload a big list of transit agencies from another place (the way we seeded City-Go-Round with U.S. transit agencies) Brandon (cc') could give you some pointers on how to write code to do that.

It would be great to get more agencies in there!

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Transit Developers" group.
To post to this group, send email to transit-d...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to transit-develop...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers?hl=en.

[S.M.Sabri S.M.Ismail]

Hi Matt,

Thanks. I'll try to get the guys to upload to GTFS Data Exchange when they get RapidKL MY data into publishable form on Google Transit. Creating a GTFS feed without a back end scheduling system in place, nor a publicly posted time table is looking to be a challenge.

Searching http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/agencies didn't find me LTA SG GTFS feed. I'll have to ask them directly for it, I guess.

regards,
sabre23t =^.^=