Buses, Index Cards, and Transit Feeds

On our last trip to Chattanooga, I was lucky to stay with a hostess who has hospitality in her blood (she’s the daughter of B&B owners) and thought of everything to make my stay comfortable.

On my first day at the house, she gave me this index card: a handwritten bus schedule that lists the arrival times for the bus stop nearest her house. Puzzled, I opened google maps to double check the accuracy. Then, I figured it out.

There are no transit directions for Chattanooga in google maps. To catch a ride on the bus, you need to know the nearest stop to you and the route that best suits your journey. If you know that, you can use CARTA (Chattanooga Area Regional Transportation Authority)’s real time arrivals site.

CARTA is a progressive, forward looking transit authority. They run free electric shuttles downtown and have sensors on every bus. You can watch the buses crawl the city at their bus tracker. So, as you’d imagine they are eager to get their General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) to google to power google transit maps for Chattanooga.

Our Code for America team got in touch with CARTA and offered to help in any way we can. We’re excited about this partnership. We look forward to helping develop a sustainable process for getting this data to google, and hopefully beyond: to the cities new open data portal, where any developer can use it to make great transit apps for the citizens of Chattanooga.