GGW points me toward some pretty discouraging news about how NextBus has treated other transit app developers. They assert their copyright on arrival times; they demand licensing agreements, yet refuse to do so on a small scale; and, perhaps most astoundingly, they say that free iPhone apps count as commercial use of the data because apple sells the iPhone on the strength of the app store’s offerings. Ugh.
On the bright side, the technical aspects of my work on a map-based NextBus iPhone app are proceeding well. At the moment there are no obvious obstacles that need to be overcome. That’s not to say those obstacles don’t exist — they almost certainly do — but a seemingly clear path ahead is about the best you can hope for in a technical project.
Oh, and I had another look at the GTFS/NextBus stop match-up. The news is still bad. I’d hoped that the average distance between stops was being pulled up by a few bad matches, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact there are only about two dozen matched stops closer than 10m from one another. I’ll have another look eventually (maybe NextBus is using a different projection system?), but for now the NB dataset is sufficiently complete that I can rely on it for my work.
