iPhone transit directions in SF. Image from Trillium Solutions.

Technology writers and entrepreneurs talk about “innovation” a lot. It’s a tough concept, though. For many people, the products and companies we can see and touch right now are easy to grasp, while the vague potential of people building new tools we can’t conceive of today is less obvious.

Professor Lawrence Lessig wrote in Newsweek about the FCC’s failings. It’s supposed to manage our airwaves and telecommunications systems to encourage more and easier communication. But in practice, it ends up regulating these systems to benefit the companies operating services today in ways that impede new people building new services tomorrow.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, writer Douglas McGray talks about San Francisco’s experience releasing its schedule data for Google Transit:

Just a few days after Apple’s iPhone launched, a trip planner for the San Francisco Bay Area’s subway system, BART, appeared in the iTunes application store, which sells iPhone and iPod software for download. User reviews were mixed. But I was still floored. How could a local government agency move so quickly?

Turns out, it didn’t. In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data in a simple, standard, open format—a text file, basically, with a bunch of numbers separated by commas—so Google Maps could generate bus and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for any platform.

“It’s not 1995,” BART’s Web-site manager, Timothy Moore, explained. “A single Web site is not the endgame anymore. People are planning trips on Google, they’re using their iPhones. Because we opened up our schedule, we are in those places.”

A couple weeks after that first BART application appeared, a new trip planner went live. This one, called iBART, was a thing of beauty. Free, too. It was written by two former high-school buddies—Ian Leighton, a sophomore at UC Berke­ley, and David Hodge, a sophomore at the University of Southern California. Forty thousand people downloaded the program in just a few weeks.

“We’ve created competition among developers,” Moore said, “to see who can serve our customers best.”

Too bad Metro staff don’t feel that way.

Metro General Manager John Catoe and Chief Administrative Officer Emeka Moneme told the WMATA board last month that they wanted to guarantee that any trip planner was up to the highest quality standards. But as McGray explained, the first BART trip planner for the iPhone had its flaws too. iPhone users didn’t blame BART; they wrote their own, better trip planners.

Besides, the wmata.com trip planner isn’t going to know about the special bus routes Metro plans for the Inauguration either. Metro staff are doing their best to adapt to quickly changing conditions, so I understand if it’s impractical to fix the trip planner for this day. But Metro should not argue that the trip planner is perfect and anyone else’s tool unreliable.

McGray continunes,

Last September, [BART’s] Moore added a feed that broadcasts imminent train arrivals in real time. He’s eager to see what people will do with it. “We can’t envision every beneficial use for our data,” Moore told me. “We don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources, and frankly, we don’t have the vision. I’m sure there are people out there who have better ideas than we do. That’s why we’ve opened it up.”

Barack Obama seems to get this. DC’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer gets this too. They’ve released lots of data knowing people will make all kinds of unexpected uses of it. Recently, I attended a meeting where someone suggested reaching out to houses of worship about a project in their area. Fortunately, there’s a feed for that. Who knows what great tools and analyses people could devise if WMATA released feeds for station locations, schedules, bus routes, ridership numbers, and more.

Tips: Joshua S. and Michael Perkins.

Previously: