BusTime: Open-Source, Open-Data Vehicle Tracking for NYC MTA

[Brian Ferris]

I wanted to give a quick shout-out to the New York City MTA's new
BusTime project ( http://bustime.mta.info/ ), which launched a week or
two ago. This pilot system provides real-time vehicle location
information through a number of interfaces to riders of the B63 bus
route in Brooklyn.

The cool thing about this system is that it's all open-source and
open-data from day one. Through a partnership between the
civic-software-hackers at OpenPlans (
http://openplans.org/transportation ) and the OneBusAway project (
http://onebusaway.org/ - hey, that's me), the MTA put together a
system that is immediately accessible to local developers looking to
write apps, that provides an open platform for other transit agencies,
and that does it all while being extremely cost competitive with
existing solutions.

Real-time info is made available to developers in a
standards-compliant format (SIRI - http://siri.org.uk/ -
https://groups.google.com/group/siri-developers ). Developers
interested in working with data from the BusTime system should check
out:

http://bustime.mta.info/wiki/Developers/Index

You can see the original press release about this project at:

http://www.mta.info/mta/news/releases/?agency=nyct&en=110201-NYCT11

Thanks,
Brian