That said, there's obviously some data that doesn't carry that risk.

Well this is obviously the problem. In my (painful) experience¹, having corporate lawyers make decisions about intellectual property is about as productive as having sharks decide on how to deal with endangered species.

1. The lawyers of the corporation I worked for decided that I, as a researcher in the corporate lab, couldn't be allowed internal use (no product intended) of technology that had been developed in my own lab.

There's a trip planner on the WMATA website that includes not just the Metrorail and Metrobus systems, but the adjuncts like Montgomery County's Ride-On buses.

I'm surprised New York's being perverse on this.

They weren't entirely up-to-date even then, with revision dates primarily back in the late 1990s – I don't know if they were removed for that reason, since the timing also suggests it could've been a post-9/11 "security" excuse.

In Washington DC, as I recall, a big part of the kerfuffle was that the Metro folks could point to something like $300K in revenues from people accessing their (partly ad-supported) web site for the information.

It's a bit better now that I have Google maps on my Crackberry, but that requires a signal.

No, just say *what* format it is and point it into /public_html/.

Most of the apps that work with the Portland system are not iPhone apps at all; some of them are schedule viewers or bus arrival alerts that use text messaging, so are usable on any cell phone.

Why do it? Because anything that makes it easier to use mass transit has the potential to increase ridership¹, thus increasing revenue.

1. I hate that word, but my wife's cousin, who's a consultant for mass transit systems, tells me it's not going away, so I should get used to it.

I bet a substantial number of people who fail to find the data they need give up and either walk or take a taxi, especially if they're in a rush or are tourists, thus cutting down on said revenue ...

The system's managers are in a bit of a bind. Yes, it's great that more and more people are using public transit, but if that makes the entire system financially unfeasible, the whole thing falls apart. They can only increase fares so much. They're hoping for more government funding.

Cold War memories: Reds are nasty, see, they don't publish reliable city maps.

There are US street directories, but the Thomas Guide does not compare to the wonder that is Melway (they look even better on paper, where the colours are less saturated and the resolution is higher). Also, Melway was (perhaps still is) sufficiently ubiquitous in Melbourne that a page and grid cell was a common way of giving directions, like a pre-internet hyperlink.

I do wonder if the relatively easy availability of basic street data from the Census Bureau in the US discourages publishers from investing in really good maps.

All I had was a carry-on overnighter, so I paid him and walked across the street and checked in.

I can also give a better link for "bus routes down Broadway".

Re #10, there is no need for the MTA to do extra work to massage the data into GTFS (the standard format) -- I have done it already for bus schedules, and should complete subway schedules in the next week or so. My code is released as free software. Also, the MTA apparently uses a proprietary package called HASTUS for at least NYCT bus schedules, and HASTUS can supposedly generate GTFS natively.

The MTA wants a share from programs and services charged for. Yes, the MTA should absolutely 100% provide, as far as it is able, up-to-the-minute routing and service information for free to the public, including free re-packagers and re-providers. On the other hand, I see no problem with the MTA insisting on a fair share of revenue made directly from its information. (This is, by the way, the structure I also advocate for legal information and reporting. I have no problem being charged for the value-add of Lexis or Westlaw, but I'm thrilled that there are, more and more, appropriately free sources for directly pulling a cite).

And thank you, Novalis -- whatever happens to the for-pay sources, I know that the free-track sources will continue to grow and improve.

Starting with the link Patrick provides, it's not hard to find at least one case where the MTA refused to negotiate pricing for access then accused developers, perfectly willing to pay for this information, of working in bad faith. In the case of StationStops, the MTA claimed that the disclaimer "Not Affiliated with the MTA" implied "an initial and ongoing relationship with the MTA" and claimed that "There is no such language!" that could actually disclaim such a relationship. (The blog at www.stationstops.com is interesting reading.)

If anything this seems to be a case where a developer is perfectly willing to give the MTA money, but the MTA won't take it. It doesn't seem fair to make the argument that the MTA deserves "a fair share of revenue made directly from its information" without also pointing out how they have approached doing this.

We don't have a robust enough transit system to warrant actual updates to transit maps. Unfortunately.

There's a bit in Delany's Triton where Bron is on Earth and he keeps saying "Don't think in terms of urban units, there aren't any!" which I thought was science fiction until I realised it was the way Americans are with blocks in Europe.

I get a laugh, some days, as I come home from wherever along a street which has a gap of about a block, in between two major streets: someone will come along that section, expecting it to go through, and run right into the dead end, with no idea how to get out except to go back to the last major intersection.

What gets really entertaining is when there's a grid slapped right on top of the hub and spokes. Intersections take on fascinating shapes that way.

This can get a bit confusing when the grids have bent enough from the origin. In much of the northwest, the streets marked "east-west", by grid reckoning, are really more north-south by geographic reckoning, and vice versa. It took me a while to get used to this.

Pittsburgh's topography in much of the city is far too three-dimensional for grids to work, or for there to be any guarantee that three lefts will get you anywhere near where a right would take you. After a few lefts, you may well cross under your original street, on a bridge hundreds of feet above you.

West coast cities other than LA also have problems. San Francisco has at least two grids, at roughly right angles; they sort of meet around Market Street. In Seattle, it's much much worse, as there are at least three grids colliding downtown, and there appears to be no such thing as a legal left turn anywhere along those fracture lines. Add in the fact that street names (usually numbers) repeat in different sectors of the city and that the only way you can tell them apart is by the sector designator (NW, N, etc.) and you have a recipe for permanent lostness, particularly if you are one of those poeple whose sense of direction gets ruined by proximity to water. I've spent at least a couple of months in Seattle over the last 30 years, and I still can't get a coherent overall picture of what I'm doing.

A number of streets don't connect to the major cross streets, so you have to go in a block, take a minor street to connect, and then drive along. Odds are it will be a bit less than half a mile long (because that't where the major streets are), and most of the residential cross streets won't connect; you have to know which one's grant access.

Thos. Bros. is a really nice system, but their are (of course) a lot of introduced errors (as a means of copyright protection). I recall being late to a rehearsal because I was on foot, had check the map and tried to go in a manner impossible.

There is a place in the north-eastern part of Halifax, NS, where, for some reason beknownst only to city planners, two streets meet a third in a rather peculiar tangle. The map we were using indicated that all three streets actually intersected at some point, and one could turn off one on to the other.

Naturally, we were a little surprised to find that the street we were on dead-ended in the parking lot of a doughnut shop. Fortunately, there was an exit from the parking lot onto the street we wanted, but I still wonder to this day whether this unexpected result was due to a deliberately introduced error in the map, a real mistake on the part of the surveyors, or the propensity of Tim Hortons doughnut shops to sprout up unexpectedly, like autumn mushrooms, in most large Canadian cities.

Even in Manhattan, it's not all grid and right angles; at the north end it goes 204, 207, 211, 214th [a block of staircase], 215 [part of which is a staircase], 216, 217, 218: but 216th is a single block, and 217th is a single block, and they don't intersect the same streets. We manage, though people working only with printed road maps periodically run into problems when they find that 215th Street doesn't go through if you're using wheels.

But I can't blame the city for Rand-McNally's unwillingness to indicate staircases as distinct from roads suited to things with wheels.

But the nasty problem with Portland streets is that even in the grids, they don't always continue. I used to live on SW California St., of which there were four segments: 5 blocks between 55th and 60th, 3 blocks between Capitol Highway and 27th, and unconnected 1 ½ (really just a couple of cul-de-sacs), and 4 block segments on the hill between I-5 and the Willamnette River. There is no simple route that connects either of the first two segments with the latter two, though you'd think it would be easy to get from one part of a street to another. The streets parallel to California (all named after states) do the same thing in different places.

Having read the last few posts I'm now getting worried about what the maps don't show (or do show that ain't so). "Roads" that are flights of stairs are a read problem if you're not in a stunt car.

I do remember having problems back in Cambridge (UK) when a driver asked me the way somewhere. The only routes I, as a cyclist, knew, involved going between bollards - not possible in a car. I'm afraid I was in the classic position of saying "well, if you're trying to get there, I wouldn't start off from here..."

I've also found locations (in Squirrel Hill) where the traditional "go around the block" methodology -- turn right at every intersection until you return to your starting point -- produces startling results. Such as a multi-mile cloverleaf pattern that crosses over the highway twice, crosses under and over itself, and halfway through the "block" you pass your starting point on the other side of the street.

Especially since Mass[achusetts] Ave doesn't actually enter Somerville ;)= (it is less that half a block away at some points (and looks like the border was set based on that, there is an otherwise inexplicable bulge in the Cambridge border)).

Marilee #39:

eliddell, #36, some maps purposely put in streets that don't exist to make sure other people aren't stealing their data. We have two streets that come about four feet from each other horizontally, and about eight feet from each other vertically, and you have to go to the highest definition to see that they don't connect on the online maps.

Since map data is a compilation of public data without unique properties or organization*, the data is completely public domain. Except of course, the pseudo-streets which are proprietary. The only copyright violation should therefore only be for that street(s). I suspect the map companies claim that that makes all of their map data proprietary.

*At least from the point-of-view of making your map from their map. Certainly the image is under valid copyright, as well as all the behind-the-scenes stuff on a computer-based map.

On my first visit to Pitt, to apartment hunt and drop off paperwork at CMU, I used a campus map that had North on the bottom. I figured things out quickly enough, but getting back in the direction I wanted meant going around the block. I chose Craig. My three right turns put me on the road through Panther Hollow, with Forbes Ave. on a bridge high overhead.

I was still finding new neighborhoods within a few minutes of my apartment when I moved out 18 months later.

Rochester NY has a hub and spoke layout, although the center of the city is not its lake port, but its river waterfall; the location was selected to use the waterfall for a mill. Not an east coast city though; at one time it was considered the western frontier. The addition of the Erie Canal provided the means to transport the mill's production. One of the notable features of the city was an aqueduct carrying the canal over the Genesee River.

Later the canal was relocated, and the original canal bed was repurposed for a subway (and even later, parts of the subway system were incorporated into expressways currently in use). Although defunct for years, the subway still has fans (here is a might-have-been map as if it had never been shut down).

Here are some pictures of the aqueduct as it looks today, next to a library built on the foundations of an old mill race. Currently, there are proposals to restore the aqueduct back into a canal park!

Pardon the links... I am not employed by the local government...

You've never been to Pittsburgh, have you? We have way too many hills for that, and are victims of a pre-car street layout.

The cloverleaf trip I mentioned at #45 is now plotted on Google Maps: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=101129065083838639269.000474a7a931ff8796468&z=16

The one Stefan started at #51 is: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=101129065083838639269.000474a4b422a3f57a3b6&z=15