Kevin Desmond on Taking King County Metro Data "Private"

By coincidence, the same morning I sat down to discuss the success of private bus guides like One Bus Away with King County Metro's general manager Kevin Desmond, One Bus Away released its iPhone application.

The question I had was this--given Metro's well-documented budget woes, was there more than customer convenience to be gained from letting private software developers take on a larger role?

OBA is the brainchild of Brian Ferris, a grad student in Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. Ferris is studying human-computer interactions, so in a sense, Seattle's bus riders are living inside Ferris's experiment.

"What he's done is terrific," said Desmond, who is thin, monologue-prone, and data-driven. In fact, data is the next thing he brings up, pointing out that OBA runs on top of Metro data. "The issue for us with the private developer world is how can we better meet their needs. What standards should we use? We're planning a developer's workshop, probably in late October."

OBA's website and iPhone app are free, despite the many, many programmer hours involved. "If we had tried to do something like One Bus Away, that would have cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and a multiyear procurement and project management. The public sector has to follow its way of doing things," Desmond said.

So far, so good. But of course things are going so smoothly precisely because there's no money involved and the data is public. If money were being made from the use of data the Metro provided, Desmond wonders, would he have a responsibility to carve out a share for the agency (and taxpayers) who fund the creation of that data? There are knotty legal questions emerging over what "public" data even means.

Or consider this: "We were the second site to work with Google, to have our Trip Planner data incorporated into Google Transit." Once cutting edge (for public transit, at least), Metro's Trip Planner software is showing its age; Desmond estimated that replacing Trip Planner would be a two-year project and would cost a million to two million dollars. Does it make more sense to offload trip planning to Google? And if so, what happens if Google decides trip planning isn't worth its time?

These are the dilemmas that are troubling transit heads across the nation. On the one hand, their increasingly smart-phoned ridership is demanding real-time information from intuitive UIs, but on the other, public transit agencies are not known for speed in shipping software.

One thing that clearly makes sense is in progress, Metro's OBS/CCS Project: as part of replacing outmoded radio communications on board Metro buses, GPS tracking will be installed, and a number of other options will be added. The first GPS bus will hit the road in late spring of 2010 and all will be newly outfitted by 2011. With the upgrade will come "talking" buses that announce (and visually display) their stops automatically. The buses will also get a traffic light priority system that will engage when they are behind schedule to stay on time.

With this upgrade, Metro will be better prepared to face situations that force bus drivers to reroute--under the current AVL system, once buses leave their usual route, the tracking system breaks down. The agency was roundly criticized for that failure during last winter's snowstorm, when multiple reroutes were in effect and bus arrivals and departures accorded with no known schedule.

(More to come next week: Metro and Twitter, user feedback and transit unions, and ORCA cards and Rapid Ride.)