Having had some issues with obtaining the bike share data for some cities, it was refreshing to receive an email from some developers in Rennes, NW France, detailing the public API for transport data that the city has made available, under a Creative Commons-style licence for reuse. You have to sign up for an API key, through their data website, and then all the data you need is available, quickly and with documentation, through XML or other popular machine-readable formats. As well as the bike-share data, metro line information, including alerts, is also available.
Why can’t all cities be like this?
Picture by Eun Byeol Lee on Flickr
4 replies on “Rennes, a Model City for Transport Data”
I am a graduate researcher in the US (Virginia Tech) and am looking for a contact person with Vcub to gather information on their operations – specifically system balancing. Do you have any suggestions on who to contact?
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Not only can you find bike-share, metro line and bus (there’s a GTFS dataset available) data, but this is only a part of the deal. There’s also a data repository for Rennes Métropole which includes “social” data (administrations, associations: where and when to find them. It used to be a paper document) as an API similar to the one for the transportations, and all kind of GIS informations (roads, counties, voting center, all kind of car/coach/bike parks, sport equipments…) related to the city of Rennes and surrounding smaller cities, available both as KML and various shape files.
Some people complain about the license (which is similar to a CC-by-ND, meaning that they can’t include those data within OpenStreetMap) and some data may still be missing or not up to date, but it is still a great (and interesting) job that they have done.