The excellent Michael Perkins at Greater Greater Washington reports from yesterday’s D.C. Council oversight hearing for WMATA, and hears Metro General Manager John Catoe promise that the transit agency will finally release its schedule and routing information by March 23. The statement comes several months after Metro first suggested that working with Google Transit was not in their best interest and that they would only pursue such a relationship if it made them money.

This is huge news for all the interweb and transportation geeks who have been sounding the open sharing of data battle cry since December. The pressure placed on Metro to join the growing list of other transit agencies already making their data available to Google appears to have paid off. And as Perkins notes, it won’t only be Google Transit that will be able to take advantage of Metro’s decision:

This is even better than just doing a deal with Google, because anyone will be able to use the data. Actually, Catoe didn’t give any updates on a specific deal with Google. Other agencies have signed specific deals. Metro might still do that, but it looks likely they might not at all.

How great is that? Metro figured out a compromise position based on feedback from you, the riders. Perhaps they didn’t feel that partnering with Google on Google’s terms would work for them, so they decided instead to just give the data away and let anyone use it.

We can think of at least one person on our staff who is likely to take advantage. No formal announcement of this policy has yet to come out of the WMATA shop, so we’ll be sure to update when more details become available.