Paul Lowry, Flickr, Creative Commons.
DCL
To make the world greener, we need better ways for people to move around. We can't keep relying on the automobile, especially when it comes to commuting and moving around in dense urban areas. Public transportation is the best alternative, but for it to do the job it needs to be more effective than what we have now in most of the U.S.
This will require big investments into new infrastructure, but money's not everything. One free way to make the system better is to open up the databases of transportation agencies and allow others to find new ways to do useful things with the data. This might seem like a small thing, but check out the great video below by our friends at Streetfilms to see how big a difference it can make:
And it's not surprising when you think about it. When Google opened its API for Google Maps and Google Earth, people started building apps that took advantage of this platform, and started creating new ways to aggregate data using the platform. Same with electoral data and countless of other databases that have been made more accessible to the public in recent years thanks to the internet.
Open data for public transportation has a chance to bring transit in the 21st century, making it easier for the connected generations to incorporate a bus ride into their fluid daily schedule (the possibility to see where buses are at any moment on a map, to know exactly how long before it gets to a certain stop, etc).
So I'm asking all the transportation agencies who are still holding their data close: Let it go. There's no benefit to being the only source of information about your routes and schedules, and making it hard for others to access that data is only increasing friction for your customers. Open data is the future, and that includes public transportation!
Video by Streetfilms, licensed under Creative Commons.
