article in the Atlantic on transit data sharing

[Joe Hughes]

The Atlantic Monthly just published a good article about open
government and transit data sharing, including a well-deserved shout-
out to Tim Moore's efforts at BART (along with TransitCampBayArea and
the iBART guys).

Joe

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200901/technology-government

iGov: How geeks are opening up government on the Web
by Douglas McGray

Barack Obama has said we need a “Google for government.” It’s a nice
line, but what does it mean? Federal agencies have been online since
the mid-’90s. Obama’s first crack at a Google-for-government law led
to USAspending.gov, a budget tracker that looked like everything else
the feds had put up on the Web—until I saw one geek-speak phrase on
the home page, so small I almost missed it: API Documentation. To
understand its significance, let me tell you how I got subway
schedules on my iPhone.

Just a few days after Apple’s iPhone launched, a trip planner for the
San Francisco Bay Area’s subway system, BART, appeared in the iTunes
application store, which sells iPhone and iPod software for download.
User reviews were mixed. But I was still floored. How could a local
government agency move so quickly?

Turns out, it didn’t. In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit
agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data
in a simple, standard, open format—a text file, basically, with a
bunch of numbers separated by commas—so Google Maps could generate bus
and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided
to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did
that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for
any platform.

“It’s not 1995,” BART’s Web-site manager, Timothy Moore, explained. “A
single Web site is not the endgame anymore. People are planning trips
on Google, they’re using their iPhones. Because we opened up our
schedule, we are in those places.”

A couple weeks after that first BART application appeared, a new trip
planner went live. This one, called iBART, was a thing of beauty.
Free, too. It was written by two former high-school buddies—Ian
Leighton, a sophomore at UC Berke­ley, and David Hodge, a sophomore at
the University of Southern California. Forty thousand people
downloaded the program in just a few weeks.

“We’ve created competition among developers,” Moore said, “to see who
can serve our customers best.”

I met Moore and Leighton at a gathering in Silicon Valley called
TransitCamp. Inspired by a similar event in Toronto, the idea was to
brainstorm what you might do with transit-agency data. Nearly 100
people came. One guy was looking to build a Web site that combined an
online ride-share forum with BART arrival and departure times. A pilot
who runs an air-taxi business was hoping to mash up flight, bus, and
subway schedules. Environmental activists were seeking new ways to get
cars off the street.

What does any of this have to do with the federal budget? Well,
USAspending.gov might look like any other government Web site, but its
API—that’s Application Programming Interface—allows access to the
site’s raw data in an open, standard file format, similar to a transit
feed. (“Wow,” Moore said. “That’s really powerful.”) Enterprising
programmers, researchers, bloggers, or watchdogs like the Sunlight
Foundation or Govtrack can grab that data and slice it, dice it, chart
it, graph it, map it, or mash it up with new feeds.

It’s not just the API that’s a big deal, Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief
data architect, told me. “It’s the discipline an API imposes,” he
said. To build one, an agency has to record and store data in a way
that anticipates public use. “Data sharing is no longer an
afterthought,” Elin explained. “You begin with the notion that you’re
going to share information. And you’re going to make it easy for
people.” (Compare that with the approach of the Federal Communications
Commission, which allows only limited searching of filings and
comments; or that of the Department of Justice, which puts out data on
foreign lobbying in unwieldy PDF format and binders.) An API also
encourages the release of data in real time, instead of in occasional
reports, like Federal Election Commission figures, or earmark
spending.

Last September, Moore added a feed that broadcasts imminent train
arrivals in real time. He’s eager to see what people will do with it.
“We can’t envision every beneficial use for our data,” Moore told me.
“We don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources, and frankly, we
don’t have the vision. I’m sure there are people out there who have
better ideas than we do. That’s why we’ve opened it up.”

We’d know a lot more about our government if Washington opened up the
same way.