[iRail] De Lijn and Google transit

Sat Nov 6 09:04:42 UTC 2010

Hi Koen,

Welcome to the mailinglist! De Lijn will as far as we know not share
this data publicly. Our biggest frustration is that in politics, the
minister thinks sharing the monopoly (sorry for the harsh words) on data
with 1 other company is a good thing. We want of course this data to be
shared with everyone around.

The google transit API is of course pretty neat, but at this moment it
only returns non-realtime (correct me if I'm wrong) information and only
operates in America. We can easily make a gtfs feed out of our current
code by inheriting from the class ConnectionsOutput in
api/OutputHandlers/. I wouldn't be a good community manager if I
wouldn't ask you to implement it yourself if you have interests in
that ;-). At this moment our focus is based on a better mobile site and
keeping up with our own API specification, which we didn't implemented
entirely yet.

The gtfs differs from our API in two ways:
 * google does not calculate the route for you. In our system we
created, on special request from the NMBS (because they don't want
others to provide other ways to go to a location), the connections api
where we implement via's ("overstappen").
 * google does not provide delay/cancel/strike information. Which in
Belgium is quite necessary.

Pieter

On Sat, 2010-11-06 at 09:45 +0100, Koen van Besien wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am new to this list and just started to follow
> the discussions here.
> 
> I was wondering after reading this article in
> the Belgium newspaper [dutch]
> 
> http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=DMF20101104_108
> 
> 
> Where Delijn , one of the bus transport companies will
> share there timetables with Google.
> 
> Is this data then also publicly available for others?
> Or does Google pay for this data?
> 
> Apart from this how good is this Google transit api?
> 
> http://maps.google.com/help/maps/transit/partners/participate.html
> http://code.google.com/intl/nl-NL/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html
> 
> How does irail differs from this?
> 
> Keep up the good work.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Koen
> 
> 
> --
> Koen van Besien
> 0485 68 29 28
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