[Talk-transit] Again about time tables, and some interesting sites

[Jacques Lys]

Hello,

I'm afraid you're wrong : Transit data are generally not freely available in
France.
You should know that legally, PT are the responsibility of local
authorities. In fact these authorities entrust the operation of PT networks
to companies which are often subsidiaries of three major groups (Keolis,
Transdev and Veolia ... soon 2 because Transdev and Veolia are expected to
merge!) through "Delegations de Service Public" (Delegations of Public
Service) concluded for a fixed period (often 10 years).

In fact, PT data are most often seen by agencies as being critical data they
have to protect while submitting tender for "Delegation de Service Public".

Contrary to what you seem to believe, nobody enjoys 'nice governmental jobs'
in French PT (almost all agencies are under common law...) and it's not by
simple jealousy that employees wanting to protect their jobs refuse to
submit data!

Fortunately, for some time, the trend seems to be in setting PT data free :
local authorities are more and more seeing themselves as the PT data owners
and some of them are planning to make those data freely available to the
public. That is what comes just to be done in Rennes (Brittany), where the
"Communauté d'Agglomération Rennes-Métropole" recently proposed data in GTFS
format (http://www.nosdonnees.fr/package/donnees-transport-rennes-metropole
).

The times they are a-Changin', even in France !

Cordialement.

Jacques Lys
OpenStreetMap Contributor
IT Manager in a French Transit Agency
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-transit/attachments/20101206/37ab9a6c/attachment.html>