Public Transport Minister Jacinta Allan advised back in January that work had started to allow data from the Victorian Public Transit system in a standardised format. While March is about to close, the Labor government has delivered with Labor premier David Andrews announcing the release of data on reddit.
In a tweet, Mr Andrews pointed users to a reddit thread which was linked to a screen shot hosted on imgur, which showed the comparative differences between Google Transit information in Melbourne (non-existent) to Sydney (fully populated).
In the reddit thread, Mr Andrews also linked to the data which has been released which developers can now access. The data has been released in General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) which ‘defines a common format for public transport schedules and associated geographic information’. The data released contains ‘scheduled information for all metropolitan and regional train, tram and bus services in Victoria’.
While the data still isn’t showing up in Google Transit as yet, the data is now there and we know Google is fast when it comes to implementing this sort of thing. Shout out if you see any updates in your data.
