Recap of our Meeting with SunTran

We had a good meeting with SunTran yesterday and got some good results.

First, SunTran has two kinds of data:

1. route data: schedules, mapping shape files, names, etc. This data changes once every three months.

2. real-time data: where buses are at any given moment +/- 30 seconds.

Both data sets are managed by software provided by Trapeze, which has a near-monopoly on transit data systems throughout the country.

SunTran has offered to give us a data dump of the route data; live access to their system is not going to happen since the system also contains sensitive data about employees and pretty much their entire operation. But they’ve said they’re happy to give us an export, and when they do it should be pretty easy to set up a database and web service to feed that data.

The real-time data is somewhat more problematic, since it’s not possible to do data dumps in any real-time way, and the chances of us getting our own code onto the server are very slim. However — they already do some basic google mapping on their site:

http://www.suntran.com/webwatch

And since that’s google maps, it didn’t take us long to figure out how to get the raw JSON data queries in a somewhat useful format. So — provided they don’t take issues with us doing it — we can pretty easily tap into that *already published* data source and repurpose it however we want.

So this is all good news! Kit has a couple days open to work on this, and he’s planning to get a basic demo up by Monday, which may also include translation to KML so we can actually see real-time bus locations and routes — in google earth! for instance. And possibly even overlay multiple routes on top of each other.

Our chief goal is to make this data more accessible on an immediate basis so that we can all start using it in creative ways. We’ll publish our API to the wiki as it gets developed.