SFAppeal wrote a great article detailing the hurdles of trying to get real time info from a public transit agency.

In the case of San Franciso Muni, they claim to own the data and also the desire for the public to access that. A Muni representative even mentioned that they want to provide their real time arrival data in an easy to access format.

Unfortunately, the data is collected by Nextbus and a completely separate company confusingly named Nextbus Information Systems claims to own the data and offers it for a modest fee of “tens of thousands of dollars per month” to any independent developers who might want to build applications using it. There seems to be a real disagreement between Muni, Nextbus, and Nextbus Information Systems about who owns real time transit data and how developers should or shouldn’t be able to access the data.

Instead of letting us see when our buses are coming, NBIS locked the arrival times in an imaginary vending machine. This would be like if advertising giant Clear Channel waltzed into the subway stations, tore down all the Muni maps, and then offered to sell them back to you at a steep markup.

NextBus Information Systems was responsible for shutting down the Routesy iphone application and apparently keeps close tabs on who is scraping data from the nextbus site for their own applications and then tries to shut them down. The threat of having to pay for expensive licenses has made us at BlinkTag focus our development efforts around BART and Trimet, both of which provide easy to access, developer friendly real time data. I wonder how many other apps have been shutdown or scrapped before launch. Are there other cities that have realtime data that is available online but not available for developers to use?