Georgia Inst. of Technology researchers use SEPTA as case study for open transit data implementation in Atlanta

Open data researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology looked to Philadelphia as an example in a new report analyzing how open transit data could improve the public transportation experience for riders in Atlanta.

Graduate researcher and co-author James Wong interviewed SEPTA officials in an effort to understand how the transit agency worked with developers to build transit applications, he told Technically Philly. The report, “Enabling Transit Solutions: A Case for Open Data,” included case studies of four other transit agencies in major cities including San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Boston.

The five researchers, Lauren Pessoa, Landon Reed, Jacob Tzegaegbe, Bin Yan, and Wong drew lessons they hope Atlanta transit data advocates can use to convince Georgia’s transit agencies to make data available to developers, according to the report.

Here are the lessons learned from all five case studies:

• Open data must be up-to-date and accurate; it represents a commitment by agencies to ensure that information on which many publicly available apps run is accurate.
• When staff that are interested in the project are supported by agency leadership, they are better able to overcome institutional concerns like legal issues and perceptions of extraneous work.
• Legal concerns about liability, brand and logo usage, and responsibility to maintain the information can all be addressed in a variety of developer license agreements. No agencies reported serious legal repercussions from opening schedule data.
• Costs to implement open data in GTFS format are low when scheduling software is used at large agencies, and reasonable for small agencies to do in-house or by consultant.
• Agencies can provide valuable tools to riders such as regional transit trip planners, but these come at tremendous public expense. There are now tools to provide products that compete with Google Transit at little or no cost to agencies with open data.
• Developers are critical to the success of an open data approach; their customers are the same transit riders and potential riders that agencies serve. To the extent possible, agencies should support and encourage developers to use the data. This can take the form of listservs, hackathons or agency showcases.
• Agencies have not yet studied the impacts of open data in a quantitative evaluation on ridership or customer satisfaction, except for selected examples of small surveys.

To read more about how the Philadelphia open data experience can be used to improve Atlanta, you can read the full report here [PDF].