Dear Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority

The Trip Planner on your website has been out of order every time I've checked it for the past several days.

I'm not upset at this: I know that maintaining a complicated custom-built system like the Trip Planner is difficult, and that Metro is currently suffering a variety of budget and personnel crises which might reasonably monopolize the organization's attention.  And certainly, even in regular times, what state the WMATA web site is in should be low on the list of priorities, allowing you to focus your resources on moving we customers around in a safe and timely fashion.

What I am upset about is that an  incredible amounts of money was wasted on building that complicated custom-built system, when one the world's most popular and powerful transit-planing site, Google Transit, would do it for free.



Between these outages and the many other limitations of your software when compared to Google Transit (no visual map, no mobile version, no drag and drop, no integrated search, vastly inferior user experience, and etc and etc until I lose patience in the listing), I cannot imagine a sensible reason for putting yourselves and your customers through all this grief.

But I have had it suggested to me that the plan was to use your ownership of train schedule data to make money from selling direct access to it, and/or from selling advertising on the WMATA site.

I noticed a number of problems with this claim.

First and most important: Metro is a publicly funded agency, created to serve transit needs in the Washington area.  Transit schedules, as factual information, cannot possibly be placed under copyright.  For Metro to attempt to restrict or "monetize" train and bus schedules is the height of bad faith and bad taste.

Second: it is perfectly possible to create a customized, branded application, embedded in your own site, that uses Google Maps to find and display routes.  This means that the WMATA.com Trip Planner could be made better for minor additional outlay, and far less in maintenance costs.

Third: you have little reason to seek to drive traffic to your site.  Metro's web advertising revenue doubtless is and always will be minuscule when compared to customer purchases and funding from local governments.  Don't you receive both of those in proportion to how many people use your system?  Aren't people encouraged to use your system when they can actually find out how to get from A to B?  In fact, the cost of running a site like yours, with large images, static files, and embedded flash, greatly increases the more that it is used.  Recouping any appreciable fraction of these expenses through advertising is an unattainable pipe dream.

I'm not the first person to send you a comment about this.  When your new site was first launched, I was one of the many people to send the suggestion to integrate with Google Transit.  I received a very pleasant response claiming that these talks were under way.  Some people who made this suggestion were told that your scheduling information was proprietary (as I've pointed out, an insulting thing to hear from a publicly funded agency).   Others were told it was not sufficiently accurate to distribute to Google (despite being accurate enough for the WMATA site itself).  Others were told formatting the data properly would be time consuming (valuable things often are).

Then, Brett Tyler announced that "forming a partnership with Google was not in our best interest from a business perspective."

But we see this is par for the course.  What public response Metro has given on this issue has been, put briefly, embarrassing.  It either demonstrates a hidebound fear of loss of meaningless control, a ridiculous greed for paltry streams of revenue, or an incompetent misunderstanding of copyright law.  The consistent impression has been that either no one in authority at Metro is aware of any good reason to use the current system, or that what good reasons there are, if made public, will lead to justified outrage and derision on the part of lawmakers and customers.

Metro is now the last metropolitan light rail transit agency in America to not cooperate with Google Transit.  This is far from being the Washington area's worst disgrace, but it has to be one of the most easily fixed.

Please, stop wasting our money.

Please, stop shooting yourselves in the foot.

Please, start giving us the same level of trip planning service as is enjoyed in Boston, or LA, or any of the other four-hundred and thirty-nine cities currently participating in Google Transit.

And please, don't tell me you need to find a new General Manager first.  That kind of pass-the-buck, CYA thinking doesn't fool anyone.