hbus, the transit day tripper

Metro Transit won't cooperate, but William Lachance, a Halifax programmer, builds an online bustrip planner.

by Holly Gordon

While Metro Transit is getting its Go Time and Google Transit act together, a local software developer has launched a bus route planner to help Haligonians---without help from the city.

William Lachance created hbus.ca beta, a route planner that allows Metro Transit patrons to plug in starting points and destinations to get route plans. The information includes what time bus riders should walk to paticular bus stops---including those pesky stops Metro Transit doesn't list in its online route schedules---and what transfers to take.

It's a project Lachance thought of when he came to Halifax almost two years ago. He was talking to his friend, Daniel Haran, about the city's transit system.

"We were just kind of thinking about what we really could do to make transit that much more compelling here," explains Lachance.

He adds that it's "kind of painful" to go through Metro Transit's online schedules to determine routes. Haran contacted Metro Transit numerous times from 2004 onwards, trying to get the city to release its transit data for all bus routes and bus stops. He even filed a Freedom of Information Act request to access the data. But no luck.

"You get one of two responses," says Lachance of Metro Transit's replies to his friend's---and later his own---requests. "One is just 'no.' The other one is that they give you their policy on the dissemination of geographical data, something on the order of 'give us a lot of money and we'll give you the information you can basically only use for personal use.'"

Lori Patterson, spokesperson for Metro Transit, explains further.

"We can't give our information out for somebody else to put up and run their own Metro Transit trip planning because we ultimately are accountable for it," she explains.

Patterson adds that routes are updated four times a year, and she doesn't have the resources to make sure organizations with transit data get the updated version. If someone riding the bus gets the wrong information, they'll call Metro Transit.

She's quick to add that Metro Transit has been working on a trip planner for a year, which will be out in two months. It'll be part of Google Transit, and up-to-the-minute Go Times are to be released shortly thereafter.

While Lachance says it's not uncommon for a city to keep its transit data private, the fact that Metro Transit is spending money on making its own trip planner while programmers like Lachance and Haran are willing to do it on their own time baffles him.

"I think from the social point of view, there's a lot of scope for private citizens to improve the transit system for everyone," Lachance explains. He adds that sharing the responsibility for improvement with a city's citizens can improve Halifax's transit system quickly, with significantly less cost. But Patterson says there are too many organizations and too many ideas to act outside of Metro Transit's staff.

Lachance decided to make a route planner anyway, as market research on software he created, called Routez. He converted Metro Transit's schedules and input the data into Routez. And those stops not listed on the Metro Transit schedule? Lachance biked all the routes with a GPS, recording all the times and locations.

"When I tell [people] about the biking thing, they tend to assume that I'm insane," says Lachance with a grin. "We're talking between 20 and 30 hours of biking---people easily spend that amount of time in a month watching TV."

Lachance began the project last August, and has biked most of the Halifax peninsula and some Bedford and Dartmouth routes. All of Lachance's data is open source, for other programmers to use if they wish. Now, Lachance is looking for feedback. The trip planner is far from perfect---significant routes are missing, and he wants to improve on the information the site gives its users, while also creating Blackberry and iPod applications. The incompleteness of the site isn't from bugs---it's from lack of data.

"My real hope right now is that the city can be made to see that they really have nothing to lose by opening up their transit data," says Lachance. "It's kind of fun to bike around the city, but really it shouldn't be necessary."

Comments (20) RSS

Showing 1-5 of 20

Add a comment | All comments »

Wow..what ....someone is actually working on a relevant HRM issue......I stand in awe....can we take pictures.....best wishes to this innovative thinker........ did I say I am shock.....

Posted by mcgayle on May 28, 2009 at 11:46 AM | Report this comment

Google hasn't ever demanded an exclusive right to Google Transit Feed formatted information to my knowledge. In fact, they've done an awful lot to encourage the innovative use of transit information, by making the GTFS specification public and producing the Google Transit Data feed library:

http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdata…
http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transi…

Read all about how a city submits information to Google in GTFS here:

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/transit/p…

Note that nowhere does it say anything about
how Google has an exclusive license to use the information
In fact, you can find a list of cities that have made their transit feeds public on Google's own site:

http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdata…

I think Google (and Google Transit) are awesome and I salute Metro Transit for giving them GTFS-formatted information. I just think that (1) competition (especially local competition) is always healthy and (2) there's a lot of scope for innovation in services beyond what Google has to offer. If it's possible to produce a site like hbus in just six months of part time work, imagine what else the creative programmers in this city might be capable of! Why shouldn't we encourage that? The cost is basically zero.

Posted by William Lachance on April 9, 2009 at 9:08 AM | Report this comment

lu_lu: regardless if it's a publicly funded organization, it's still proprietary information (sorry Tim, it is, regardless if it's available through freedom of information) and that leads to specific legal issues like copyright. If MT is using Google's proprietary format (as Mr. Lachance has educated me about) they've given them the rights to use that information. Google as a part of the legal agreement, most likely, has specific oversight and rights to that information (let's face it; they're large and wealthy enough to weild that sort of power). That said, if Mr. Lachance was provided that information that Google has, that may infringe on Google's exclusive right to use that information, and MT is stuck (and rightfully so) in a legal quagmire.

Posted by Dr. Fever on April 8, 2009 at 8:27 PM | Report this comment

Dr. Fever: "I just don't feel that the argument of MT providing all of their information is a valid one. It would be like me providing another bank with trade secrets."

I feel like the comments here are turning into everyone refuting Dr. Fever's arguments. But I'm willing to keep this going, because I think it's educational and important for everyone to understand.

The idea of "trade secrets" does not apply in this situation. Metro Transit is a public government agency, not a money-making venture. Ticket prices don't even remotely cover the costs of running the service. Any and all money coming into the city through Metro Transit does so indirectly through "consumers" and the work force.

So any improvement to MT's transit system is a benefit to MT and the city. There are no "trade secrets." At least, none that are really secrets. Cities are always comparing themselves with the models that have been put forward by different cities. Governments talk to each other. Metro Transit has nothing to lose by sharing its information. It has plenty to gain.

The only people who *might* stand to lose anything by the sharing of Metro Transit's route information are the companies MT has signed on with to make their new trip planner. And that "loss" is really just the result of competition.

I can only hope that MT is sourcing to local programmers. In that case it actually would be a shame if they are being undercut by other local programmers who are providing the same services for free.

Posted by lu_lu on April 8, 2009 at 5:42 PM | Report this comment

D.Morrison-- those who do not have the capability to read the PDF can pick up a transit map anywhere you can pick up a schedule. In fact, in most cases there is an overabundance of them, for free. I'm not saying the website has a use, nor should it be denied to people. I just don't feel that the argument of MT providing all of their information is a valid one. It would be like me providing another bank with trade secrets.

Posted by Dr. Fever on April 7, 2009 at 7:24 AM | Report this comment