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Comment by maxehmookau | Hacker News Reader

I would recommend that you don't use that. This data should be open. It should be quickly accessible. I don't want to have to email someone to ask permission to access data that should be freely available. There's no reason this data shouldn't be more easily available and that's what this gem does. Though I admit, web scraping is never the best way to access data.

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Traveline are paying another company to extract and normalise the data from the myriad of real time data feeds different bus companies use. Of course, ideally they would all be using open standards. But they aren't. I don't understand why you feel entitled to data which costs Traveline money to produce.

Everyone is entitled to this data. The fact buses are late where I live are a given, if I asked traveline to give me the data so that I could measure how late my buses are, they would decline. Opening data can only help to increased accountability which can only lead to better services for customers. If your data brings your company in to disrepute and your way of fixing that is to hide the data, you're doing it wrong.

if I asked traveline to give me the data so that I could measure how late my buses are, they would decline

No they would not. They will give the data to anyone. They didn't even want my name before they gave me test access of up to 1000 API hits a day (which would be sufficient for the personal usage you describe). The data itself is provided under the open government licence which allows you to do pretty much anything you want with it. As far as I can tell, there are no restrictions beyond this on what applications are allowed to use the API. Really, you should email them and ask them. I got a very quick response.

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