Hi, I'd like to hear more why data couldn't bridge that gap and why Google maps would work accross the world for cars but not for public transits.
- The game would be probably to provide some kind of standard or API that would make all those independant providers rally accross a common model. Would save communities cost & improve the service. Probably a big market.
- If you look outside of the US, public transit (in some form or the other) is for wealthy people as well. Think Japan & Europe.
> The game would be probably to provide some kind of standard or API that would make all those independant providers rally accross a common model.
This common specification already exists. It is called GTFS [1] (General Transit Feed Specification) and can be used to exchange static transit data. There is also GTFS-realtime [2], an extension to GTFS, to be used to exchange realtime transit data.
The specification was designed through a partnership of the initial Live Transit Updates partner agencies, a number of transit developers and Google. The specification was introduced and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license in August 2011.
In addition to GTFS, in Europe we have Transmodle [0], with the UK implementation being TransXChange [1], for scheduled public transit timetables and SIRI for real-time [2].
The TransXChange schema guide is a 300+ page PDF [3], so there is a big barrier to entry.
I'd like to add as an example the city in Europe I live in. The reason my city doesn't have public transit coverage in Google Maps is that they seem to have an exclusive deal with a local public-transit-route-finding company. I get it that business is business, free markets, etc. but this is clearly a suboptimal solution for an end-user. The website they give their data to is not bad, but Google Maps are clearly, objectively, better for both locals and tourists.
- The game would be probably to provide some kind of standard or API that would make all those independant providers rally accross a common model. Would save communities cost & improve the service. Probably a big market.
- If you look outside of the US, public transit (in some form or the other) is for wealthy people as well. Think Japan & Europe.