‘camera bag on shoulder tripod’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99’

Kudos to Michael Perkins over at Greater Greater Washington: from his efforts and many, many other Metro riders, WMATA is finally going to release schedule and routing info into the open Google Transit Feed Specification format by March 23. They announced this last night at the DC Council oversight hearing for WMATA.

According to WMATA’s Facebook page, we the public will be able to download bus and rail schedule and route info from Metro’s website. The data will be freely available to all who agree to their terms of use. The data released will be the exact same data that feeds Metro’s online Trip Planner…and Metro reserves the right to withdraw the data if necessary.

So in the end, this “punt” by Catoe and Co is actually better than the failed Google deal, as this allows anyone to use that data. Who knows, maybe we’ll see a Facebook application utilizing it in the future…