Many Valley Metro riders know that when their bus or light rail arrives, it may not match the time on their schedule. But a new policy may make live transit data available to the public, though your access to it may be outside the city’s hands.
The city council of Phoenix recently approved an open data policy making available real-time schedule data of the city’s transit system to the public. In partnership with Valley Metro, which serves Phoenix and surrounding cities, the data reflects where buses and light rail cars actually are as opposed to the static schedule that is currently available. The city council approved the policy as the first of several “open data” projects.
However, the city is not developing any technology to make the data accessible to the public beyond a link from the public transit department website. The hope is that the live data will attract software developers to create applications that riders can access on personal devices.
While other cities like Oakland and San Francisco already have smartphone apps that do this, it has yet to be seen if any developers will take advantage of the newly accessible data for Phoenix.
