One small plug for Trillium; a leap for transit and open data

Recently, a new page appeared on Washington DC Metro’s website (WMATA): Developer Resources.

WMATA has joined the growing ranks of transit agencies that choose to provide their schedule, route, and stop data in the Google Transit Feed Spec (GTFS) for anyone (who consents to the license agreement) to download. Hats off to DC Metro.

Trillium asks our small and mid-sized client agencies whether they’d like to make their data public in GTFS, and, if they do, we help them to take that step. So far, every agency we’ve worked with has determined making their schedule data public in the GTFS format can potentially provide more value from their data investment by making it available to a wider developer community for interesting and productive uses.

I was pleased to see that an interview I conducted on open transit data hows and whys with Portland TriMet’s CTO, Tim McHugh, and IT Manager for GIS and Location-based services, Bibiana McHugh, was linked to by the Washington Post blog, as part of the coverage of DC Metro’s choice to provide their data in a standardized format: Upgrading Transit’s Interface.