Photo by Kevin H.

Good news for software geeks, transit nerds, and anybody who rides public transit and owns a computer: Metro is serious about opening its data.

Last night, WMATA hosted an API developers’ meeting at Metro headquarters, detailing its plans to make it easier for software developers to build applications based on transit information. The Powerpoint, rows of chairs and light snacks made it seem like any other meeting, but in fact, the gathering was years in the making. WMATA has been slowly opening its data for some time, beginning with an effort to publish information in the Google Transit format and proceeding through various excruciating phases of concern over indemnification, revenue and data quality. The revival of Nextbus was a step forward, but WMATA provided no clarity about the legalities of using the new data. Bus schedules remained locked in PDFs, station arrival times had to be scraped from HTML, and in general, all signs pointed to a bureaucracy that would improve its technical offerings slowly — if at all.

Well, things are looking up. Jamey Harvey, WMATA’s Enterprise Architect, explained to a crowd of a few dozen developers that the new program — slated to launch on Wednesday — has been put together on a shoestring budget. Despite this, the presentation was extremely encouraging. Metro will be exposing a series of APIs that provide a standard means by which developers can build on transit data without worrying about everything breaking the next time WMATA rolls out a website redesign. Metrorail data will be available immediately, with Metrobus data debuting in the fall. The service will be free for both for-profit and not-for-profit users and has been built using the Mashery service. There will be daily and per-second limits on the number of requests that can be made, but Harvey stressed Metro’s willingness to increase its usage caps on an application-by-application and as-needed basis. The whole thing will live at developer.wmata.com.

What does this mean for non-developers?