Bus data suddenly top secret

Posted Jan 26, 2012 By EMC News

The writing has been on the walls for months, but the powers that be at OC Transpo made it official last week: the transit authority thinks it's a bad idea to give citizens direct access to information about where their buses are.

The new attitude flies in the face of the city's relatively new and progressive policy on "open data" - streams of information about city services and infrastructure that can be used to power mobile and computer applications ("apps") to give people easy ways to make that data useful for taxpayers.

There are data sets on child-care facilities, drinking water quality, the cycling network, park locations and much more.

But not GPS location data from OC Transpo buses.

That is, unless members of the city's transit commission stand up to chair Diane Deans and OC Transpo general manager Alain Mercier's claims that the information needs to be kept for the transit authority's exclusive use in order to make it valuable to advertisers.

OC Transpo's business and marketing plan claims the possibility of $1.1 million in new ad revenue in the bus location information, presumably from advertising on a mobile-phone app and from ads displayed on screens with updated bus arrival times at stations.

But Mercier says that amount of dough would only flow in if OC Transpo was the sole source of real-time information about where buses are.

The problem is experts on transit data and how other big cities use it say that isn't the case.

In fact, Open Data Ottawa says the city could probably make more revenue - and save money - by avoiding the expense of creating its own app. If the data is openly available, private developers would find a way to make it useful to riders at no cost to the city. It has already been done - the most popular app in a city-run contest was Where is My Bus?

Offering the information needed to create tools to make transit easier to use can also pay off by increasing trust and confidence in the system, and that in turn increases ridership and revenue.

But beyond the common sense of making the information public, and beyond the fact that many major cities have already demonstrated that this is the best practice, the city made a promise to share the data.

City council made a commitment to a new era of transparency at city hall, and a large part of that has been a stronger focus on open data. And Mercier himself committed publicly and directly to app developers that he would make the bus GPS data available.

Where OC Transpo and the city had an opportunity to increase public goodwill in a maligned post-"route optimization" period, it has instead set the stage to alienate the very people who clamour to help people use the transit system more easily.

The transit commissioners shouldn't let OC Transpo get away with it.