Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on a project that aggregates data for every public transport provider in the country (Slovenia) and presents it as a simple API, along with an application to find rides with as few clicks as possible (without having to check every provider's website). This has involved tiring meetings with city officials convincing them to give us access to the data and writing scraping bots where they weren't convinced, so I've sunk countless hours into the project.

I currently know of only 3 people using it, but I'm one of them and I believe this is something that should exist, so I don't care that I'll likely never evem break even on it. I've started a nonprofit to fund the project, but it's been mostly my own money so far. Working on it has been really fun and I learned a ton about how stuff gets done in the intersection of public and private sector - both positive and negative.

// For anyone in Slovenia interested in using it, there's an email in my profile. It's currently a closed beta, but everyone is welcome

This is deeply commendable work and a real public service. Access to public transportation is an issue for a lot of people, and outside of the usual issues of cost, often comes down to people finding the PT systems difficult and hard to use. When people make their own apps and make them freely available with the PT data, those apps are usually lightyears ahead of the official apps to the degree that it is embarrassing.

I too have been working on public transit for my city in the US and several smaller cities that I visit that tend to get ignored by the big apps.

Most of these cities have real time data, but it is from a 3rd party vendor that either tries to lock up the data or has a terrible app.

For example, the one for Steamboat Springs Colorado, a small little ski town, uses a 3rd party vendor for real time tracking information. But the app from that third party vendor is slow and frustrating. On top of that, it is a single app that supports 30+ small cities. If you search for "Steamboat Springs transit or bus" in the app store, that vendor's app doesn't even come up. As a tourist, no one has any idea that an app even exists for their public transit.

I wrote an opensource app that supports multiple real time vendors backends which I can whitelabel for different cities.

https://gotransitapp.com/

Awesome! I'm pretty sure I came across your app when I was looking for open source systems to integrate with. I'm going for the big ones first (transportr (navita), onebusaway, OSM...), but if I do end up needing a standalone app, yours looks like a great base.

Steamboat Springs is an amazing place!

One bit of feedback on your website -- it's agonizingly slow to have to wait for the list of cities to scroll -- a bar or an arrow would be lovely.

Thanks, I'll add some arrows. I guess it isn't intuitive that you can click and drag to scroll left and right through the cities.

This is, naturally, awesome.

If I put my backseat driving hat on :D my next steps would be to

a) Wait for things to take off, iron out the initial kinks, and become quietly successful, then talk to the city at a few levels higher to showcase the benefits of cohesive open data, or at least structured data - leading the conversation here might (?) be interesting, but fostering additional connectivity between different branches (while helping to frame the focal points of the technical discussion, which is critical yet often tricky) would leave a positive impression for starters, may also help with internal communication and efficiency, and will of course help everyone slowly lumber towards modernity overall.

b) Whisper "GTFS" in Google's ear ;)

I would definitely do (a) before (b) - particularly the slow-paced adoption and settlement process (maybe even quietly build the GTFS integration yourself, before making any noise) - to give the city the best fighting chance possible against involuntary infections of Chromebooks/Google Workspace/etc ;P around the time the GTFS people show up. Y'know, just in case. Good to have a position first and all that.

The reason (b) could be particularly interesting, is that - presuming there is currently poor or no integration (this suggestion is irrelevant otherwise) - running interference here successfully may (alongside improving transport info for everyone) wind up netting you an interesting position at the city (consistent, set for life, good opportunity for lateral movement and initiative-taking given your start point, etc) or a decent shot at whatever office/presence Google has in/near Slovenia (could be interesting, could be hit/miss, might not appeal at all).

It's entirely possible you're doing this because you're already in a solid position you're happy with, in which case ignore most of the above :D

The funny part is that several providers do actually have GTFS included in GMaps. Someone with decent lobbying power managed to score a contract to provide "Google Maps integration", so I don't think the providers even have the right to share the GTFS files, even if they have them.

And since the contract is absurdly overpriced and (unofficial info) charges for each conversion instead of simply handing over the conversion software, their GMaps data is often out of date. So currently, for at least one city, the GTFS file my system generates from scraped data is actually more accurate than the one they have and provide to Google.

One of my goals though is quite similar to what you're saying - to have the most accurate data and provide it openly enough that it takes away Google's (and anyone else's) power to come in and offer something like "we'll develop a conversion system for free if you push Chromebooks or GClassroom in your schools". Our municipalities love making deals that are "free", but actually end up costing far more in other ways and it really needs to stop.

I was wondering what the situation was, hah (and hoping my totally presumptuous read of the situation wasn't totally off lol... yay it wasn't).

Ugh, incompetence enforced by policy is the most flat-out frustrating thing ever. One wonders where hard cynicism comes from... :'(

I'm very happy to hear you're (somehow?!?!) succeeding at your goal of building this out, while somehow dodging all of the rent seekers' radars (boggle). It's very cool to see when these sort of wins happen. Fist bump :D

I hadn't quite mentally resolved/connected the sequence of "push XYZ service" -> "free GTFS integration"; it was much vaguer in my head, more just thinking the very presence of Google in a likely-highly-permeable environment (without strongly held technical opinions) would have a reasonably statistically meaningful likelihood of Sales swinging past at least once or twice. I guess my brain immediately noticed the opportunity to show a spine and then be observed for having done that, something something free positive reputation. I... *sigh* I guess that is only satisfying and representative of good opportunity if there is actual competent perception on the other side of the table.

My naive guess is that Google does GTFS integration (and long-term maintenance) for free worldwide (likely with small internal teams in charge of resolving locale-specific spec violations and creative interpretations) to make Maps' moat bigger and further entrench their guarantee of establishing and retaining their captive audience. I always got the impression GTFS as a whole (which I understood was a Google initiative) was predominantly a broad sweep towards getting everyone mostly on the same chapter (as opposed to the same page) to strategically solve for the "last mile" of fixup work and viably keep up with the incoming firehose of transport updates at global scale.

I can only agree that it's incredibly frustrating that sales, municipality manglement, and wasteful solutions/implementations combine with exponentially negative and infuriating effect.

As a footnote (I'm not sure if it's helpful), the state I live in (NSW Australia) has a functional/sprawling GTFS (incl. realtime) implementation that covers the (inhabited parts of the) whole state (800,000km²) with the vast majority of the transport chaos :) disproportionately centered around the greater Sydney area (vaguely around 12,000km²). It's kind of far away :) so headscratching about the data would probably have the occasional semblance to poking at a distant server in the cloud, but it could be useful as a high-level reference. (I'm unfortunately not sure what it does especially well and what it gets especially wrong.) https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/

In the Netherlands we have https://9292.nl/. It is awesome, I can plan a trip and it will show me how long I have to walk, whats buses/trains I have to take, and I can also buy tickets for all the different providers. Almost everyone here in NL uses it when they plan a trip, its even useful when you do this trip daily because it shows delays, maintenance and other important information.

Is 9292's data open? The parent commenters' project sounds more similar to http://www.openov.nl/.

This is a real public service and _I_ hope it does take off.

maybe not being in closed beta could help?

Maybe not. Right now the traffic is manageable and manual rate limiting, blocking etc is feasible.

Of course :) That is the goal, but I don't want to "launch" it until the issues are ironed out - the last thing we need is to get a lots of users and then a bunch of them miss their trains/buses because our data wasn't accurate (this has happened once or twice to our testers).

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