We’ve all used apps for planning trips using transit, but have you ever thought about what it takes to write one of these apps?
The Transportation Techies Meetup group recently invited coders to share their stories about creating programs that consume data from multiple transit agencies and blend the results together.
Because transit agencies tend to use a variety of formats for sharing data – when they share data at all – building a transit app can be a challenge.
First up to address the challenge was Matt Caywood, whose TransitScreen company grew out of a Mobility Lab project to make real-time transit information ubiquitous in buildings and other public spaces. He showed off some of TransitScreen’s recent support for carsharing and ridesharing services, and described the challenge of supporting a growing number of forms of commercial transportation. That includes three carsharing services in D.C. alone, plus peer-to-peer car- and bikesharing, and intercity transportation.
RideScout is another local startup looking to simplify transit options for people on the go. Robert, one of RideScout’s programmers, came up from Austin to tell us how their program uses Google App Engine, Google Datastore, and Python and Django. As the company adds new data sources from across the country, it plans to eventually make it easy to plan a trip from California to D.C. with a single search.
Arlington County has long been a strong supporter of encouraging alternatives to driving. It recently launched Car-Free Near Me, a web app that finds nearby transit options and lets you customize the display. Lead programmer Michael Elepano, from Redmon, gave us a history of the project. The information layer (which combines real-time data from multiple providers) is written in ColdFusion, and the presentation layer is Javascript, HTML, and CSS. The end-product has a sophisticated interface that makes it easy for people to explore options for getting around.
We also heard about an open-source project, OneBusAway. Kurt Raschke talked about the local instance being hosted by Mobility Lab, oba.mobilitylab.org. Kurt’s been a strong advocate for bringing standards to open data, and has written about this for Mobility Lab in the past. We got a good lesson in the architecture of the project. Because of its scope, we refer to it as an infrastructure, supporting not just its own suite of apps, but more importantly, its own API that can be used by other developers to simplify their data collection.
We’ve got more details from the Meetup on our hackpad.
For programmers, the struggle is to get access to open data using common standards. Once the data is easily available, it’s amazing what programmers can accomplish.
The consensus is that transit agencies should stick to running trains and buses, and not get into the app-development business. By sharing their data, individual systems become part of a larger network. Apps can make it easier for passengers to not worry about which system is providing the service.