Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

Posted Aug 25, 2016 13:06 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (guest, #32870)
Parent article: Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

I am glad that they use an underlying service (OpenTripPlanner) rather than investing effort into a distribution specific app.
Sure, offline capabilities would be nice as well, but getting at the public transport data and maintaining it is just as difficult as performing the actual routing.

At least in Germany, transport agencies perceive their schedule still as a secret asset covered by copyright and whatnot. If they hand it out at all, they often do so in special deals with Google, giving them an unfair advantage over the rest of the world.

Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

Posted Sep 1, 2016 13:29 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Isn't a special deal with Google illegal under EU law?

Not that I should comment as a Brit, we often feel that the Europeans ignore the law when it suits them ... :-) (and no, I wouldn't be surprised if they felt the same about us, though I would dispute that vigorously ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

Posted Sep 2, 2016 15:58 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

There are groups like Code for America and other public service-esque coding projects and they're working with cities to expose their timetables and such in a standard format. Groups could do the same for European cities (unless Google is being an asshat and requiring exclusivity or something).

Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

Posted Sep 4, 2016 5:41 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Google is pretty much completely responsible for both the export data formats for transport info and also the public release of such data. They created GTFS and gtfs-data-exchange.com.