NYC MTA Finally Opens The Door To Developers

Some big news today in the NYC transit sector. Finally the MTA has created a way for developers to download a variety of data files for usage in Web and mobile apps. The data is available in the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) format. We’ve watched the MTA threaten lawsuits for data usage and now in just a few months they have completely reversed course. I guess that’s what an extra quarter on the fare gets ya!

Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock has put together an excellent overview of the available data and the pros and cons of today’s release. I agree with Nicholas that you shouldn’t have to give the MTA every bit of personal information to get access to the data files. So far there’s no real-time data and the MTA Bus data is also missing (side rant, why the MTA still breaks out the MTA Bus as a separate group is beyond me – consumers don’t care how you are organized internally).

I’m still waiting for the NYC version of this Swiss Trains real-time mashup. We’ve covered several transit apps on our sister site InsideTransit including ExitStrategy which helps you figure out where to stand for maximim effectiveness. I very much look forward to the new crop of NYC transit apps that will be arriving soon on track 11.

The NY Open Transit Data group will hold their next meeting on January 20th. I plan to be at the meeting – leave a note in the comments if you plan to attend or have questions you’d like me to get answers to.