Public transit data was one of the first data sets in what’s known today as “smart cities” or the “Internet of Things” (IoT). The simple reason was that publishing a transit schedule in machine-readable format, or providing real-time tracking over a cellular data connection, is pretty cheap, relative to the cost of a subway train or bus.
Transit quickly became one of the best examples of open data. Civic leaders at transit agencies, like Portland’s TriMet, found that if they packaged data in a standard format, developers could use it to make better user experiences than transit agencies could offer. The GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) standard for transit schedules was originally created by TriMet and Google to solve the problem of sharing data between agencies and developers. Now, many agencies worldwide use the same data standard.