Bus trips on the DC Circulator can now be mapped within Google Transit, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced today. The move means that anyone attempting to get directions from Google Maps within the city will now see Circulator routes when selecting "By public transit" as the sorting option. more ›

Greater Greater Washington's Michael Perkins has been doing great work chasing down why, exactly, WMATA and Google can't come to an agreement and get Metro data into Google Transit. This post gets into the details, but the short version is that WMATA isn't inclined to play nice with Google, apparently because the agency thinks its schedule data might be worth something. No, they're not sure if they can get any money for it, but they'd like to find out: Metro has been talking about bidding out a half million-dollar contract for a consultant who can tell them whether they might be able to monetize their schedule data. Today Perkins saves them the trouble by reporting the likely answer: no. He's got Google on record saying that they don't pay New York for its transit data, despite a history of the MTA trying to extract money from those using its data. If the Big Apple can't shake down Google, what hope do our local transit bureaucrats have? It's looking an awful lot like WMATA is stonewalling developers, inconveniencing its riders and preparing to waste $500k for nothing. Maybe Metro should focus on moving people around the city and leave the dreams of internet mogul-dom to the Californians. more ›

There were long delays, petition drives, and some final technical hiccups, but WMATA has finally released its schedule data in the Google Transit Feed Specification format. What does that mean? Well, most obviously it means that Google Transit will soon be adding D.C. to its list of supported cities (UPDATE: or perhaps not — see below for a comment from Michael Perkins of GGW, who explains that there are lingering complications surrounding WMATA's legal relationship with Google). But far more exciting is the opportunity this dataset represents to third-party developers. You can bet that geeks across the region were feverishly importing schedule data into databases last night (I certainly was). So what's in a GTFS file, anyway? You can read the full spec here if you'd like, but the short version is actually pretty simple: a bunch of text files are zipped up into a single archive, which can be downloaded from the transit agency's website — in WMATA's case, the file clocks in around 20 megabytes. These comma-separated text files have names like routes.txt, stops.txt and stop_times.txt, and they can be opened in a text editor or spreadsheet program. The setup is pretty simple to understand: for example, stops.txt contains a list of bus and rail stops, complete with information like name, latitude and longitude, and assigns each one an ID. stop_times.txt, on the other hand, has a bunch of entries that assign arrival and departure times to individual routes, linking back to the stop information via each stop's ID. more ›

$68,000. That's how much money WMATA earned from web advertising in the last fiscal year. It's also, according to the Examiner, what the agency says is keeping Washington's public transit riders from being able to use Google Transit, a story which has picked up considerable steam since Greater Greater Washington got it started and we reported on it last weekend. more ›