Much ado about open data

The tech and civic journosphere reported on Wednesday evening with a revelation that the Maryland Transit Adminstration’s bus tracking project had been ‘hacked’ to ‘save Baltimore $600,000 in one day.’ Hyperbole ensued, and if you aren’t familiar with the story, it can be summed up in the following quotes from The Transit App and the MTA’s rebuttal:

Disclaimer: The content of this post is purely the opinion of the author, and not of any current or previous employer. I have not spoken with the Maryland Transportation Authority or The Transit App before writing this.

The tech and civic journosphere reported on Wednesday evening with a revelation that the Maryland Transit Adminstration’s bus tracking project had been ‘hacked’ to ‘save Baltimore $600,000 in one day.’ Hyperbole ensued, and if you aren’t familiar with the story, it can be summed up in the following quotes from The Transit App and the MTA’s rebuttal:

Baltimore’s data wasn’t made available in a developer-friendly format…This means that Baltimore’s real-time tracking data isn’t compatible with the most popular commuter apps… When reporters asked the MTA why they opted to only show the info on their mobile webpage … the MTA responded that it would have been too expensive.

Why are we still working on it? Well, our data is not in GTFS-RT format. (… General Transit Feed Specification-Real Time – is [a] data format used by developers to make transit apps.) …Our CAD/AVL system pre-dates Google. That’s why GTFS-RT was never a requirement… The cost to convert our CAD/AVL data prior to the development of the interface was going to cost MD taxpayers an additional $600,000.

I’d like to applaud both sides for being civil. Many similar discussions have devolved into the realm of toxicity. What I’ve found lacking in this discussion are nuance and actual lessons to be learned for the industry as a whole. That’s why I’m throwing my hat in the ring.
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