Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan have been working on an online trip planner for the Toronto Transit system called MyTTC.ca. It’s been a fun side project for them over the past year or so.  Kieran just announced the site is now available for public tire-kicking and feedback. Their site is cool… you should go give it a try.

The backstory is interesting. As Kieran writes on the site, he and Kevin are not the TTC. They’re just two software developers who decided this needed to be done. As they detail on the MyTTC About page, the idea was born out of frustration with the official TTC site, which has always been impossibly hard to plan trips with.

I share their pain. Several times after moving to Toronto I tried using the official transit web site to figure out how to get around the city. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I simply gave up. All the route maps were and still are provided only in PDF format, instead of simpler and smaller GIF or JPEG images. The system maps — which are the only way to figure out which route map you need — are gigantic PDFs that take ages to download and render. (Don’t try to find these maps from the main page of the TTC website, which for some reason links prominently to even stranger and less useful maps on the Toronto.ca site.) Meanwhile, the new beta TTC site has no system map yet, and no trip planner. A forlorn spot on the beta site home page proclaims, "Future home of Trip Planner".

Tragic.

So if you’re an entrepreneur who wants to buld your own trip planner, how do you get the data? Woe betide you, for the TTC won’t give it to you. The information sits in a database somewhere in the bowels of the organization, where it is periodically used to generate the aforementioned PDF route maps and now the new route pages on the beta web site. But the TTC won’t make the raw data available for public use. So Kieran and Kevin had to compile an entirely new dataset of their own by pulling the information out of hundreds of PDF route documents. Then they had to scrub it, by hand, because the data was buggy buggy buggy. The scrubbing continues.

Wow.

Unlike the TTC, Kieran and Kevin are making their dataset available to anyone who wants to play with it. This means anyone can build their own Toronto transit map or trip planner now. It also means we are a step closer to having Google Transit support, since all that’s needed to enable that is a suitable data feed. (Google has offered in the past to set up Google Transit for Toronto. Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, and even Fredericton have Google Transit support. Toronto? Sorry. No data from the TTC.)

Shame on you, TTC. Shame on government organizations that hoard power by keeping public data under lock and key.

And congratulations, Kieran and Kevin, for rolling up your sleeves and building a great public service that Toronto really needs.

[cross-posted on Mukodu Blog]