Developer Blog

Feeds demo site at http://www.marcozirino.com/MTADemo.aspx

There's an interesting development in public data access playing out in the Bay Area. An favorite iPhone application called "Routesy" has ceased to function. Broken iPhone apps aren't generally newsworthy except in this case the failure was caused by denial to public data.

Steven Peterson, a developer from San Francisco, built Routesy to take the guesswork out of using public transportation. Routesy works like this: after grabbing your current location from the iPhone or iPod Touch hardware, the application scrapes operations data from nextmuni.com, a website operated by NextBus Information Systems Inc. (NBIS). Routesy then lets you know when the next vehicle will arrive at the stops closest to you.

NBIS, Inc., the company operating nextmuni.com, negotiated an exclusive distribution contract with NextBus Inc., the company that put the GPS transponders on the busses and collects real-time information for the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni).

Routesy hit the sweet spot ... [more]

As part of my graduate degree, I'm presenting Transit Informatics and efforts such as this at the 5th annual GIS in Transit Conference in Tampa Bay, November.

There are three things we hope to achieve in this site. The first is to gather all of our public datasets, data-feeds, and programming interfaces into one place. We've started with a handful, and you can expect that the number of datasets will grow as people within the agency discover our effort.

The second thing we hope to do is provide a resource for everyone who wants to use our datasets. We will be providing initial documentation as well as a place for you to post comments and notes. If you've ever used the documentation at php.net you'll know what I'm talking about. We hope to expand on their example by providing occasional tutorials and by drawing attention to outstanding work from the community.

The third and biggest idea is to grow a community for users of this data. We're using ... [more]

Nice start! I've test driven the trip planner and have a few comments. Unfortunately, the comment system is broken for me (see below), so let me try this avenue. [more]

It has been over a week since we launched the Metro Developer site and I wanted thank everyone for their comments and feedback--keep them coming! Here's also an update on some of our issues:

Terms and Conditions 

I want to acknowledge the comments developing around our Terms & Conditions on this site and other transit developer sites (yes, I try to keep up with the discussion). I think the terms in question are valid, but would like to hear more before pulling together Metro staff to discuss amending legal language.

Site Bugs

If you haven't noticed, we're utilizing Pinax to run this site, and will be utilizing Django as the framework for our main site, metro.net (which we are rebuilding at this minute). Both platforms are very powerful and full-feature. As a start, we've turned off most of the features and opted for mastering the basic blog and ... [more]

<p>This SQL will allow you to make a running board of a particular block.</p>

On the "change route to" issue..

Based on how Google Transit handles this data (per the GTFS), it would be very confusing to the reader to see that, especially when the Google presentation is actually launched.

Good Day Developers. I am a planner that supports the scheduling data feeds to downstream users in the Service Planning Analysis Dept. I think Doug has covered the heart of the concerns/comments raised by michichan. I would like to add that we wanted to maintain the integrity of the data as it was received from the scheduling system source, which is highly validated and used by many downstream data systems. As a result we retained the native route designations one sees in the GTFS route and trip tables. I do suggest using the route named on the headsign in stop-times table for public facing applications as that will reflect what the customer will expect to see. The reason we added the “change route to” verbiage was to identify when a route designation changes in the middle of a trip. This would also be the point in the trip when an ... [more]

Michichan just posted our first application...

I have designed a very simple application that is intended to show the next "timepoint" for every bus on a particular route.

Hello Developers! I haven't introduced myself properly yet. I am a developer working for Metro's Dept. of Creative Services. I will save a more general introduction for another post. But first I would like to dive into this discussion the GTFS data set. [more]

Just for a means of background, I have never worked for Metro but I have a great knowledge of how they schedule.

The way MTA schedules is very different than other transit properties that I have encountered.

Hello everyone, welcome to Metro's new developer site.

Metro.net/developer is our new technical resource site meant to attract a community of developers and foster innovative technology. This is the place to share data with interested groups including developers as well as academics, and transit partners. We are launching with two types of data and the start of a web service.

As this is a new effort for Metro, we hope to make more data and resources available as they are ready. The best way to keep abreast of these updates is to subscribe to this blog (look for the RSS link on this page). We also encourage interested parties to join our community (click on the sign up button in the top toolbar) and give us feedback, help us make this site better.

In addition to news about Metro data, we'll also ... [more]