San Francisco has added itself to the growing list of US cities which are making its public data – including transit data – available free to developers.

On Techcrunch, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom writes in a guest post:

The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format. For example, there will be updated crime incident data from the police department and restaurant inspection data from the Department of Public Health. The initial phase of the web site includes more than 100 datasets, from a range of city departments, including Police, Public Works, and the Municipal Transportation Agency.

This is very similar to Mayor Bloomberg’s ‘Big Apps’ initiative, except, unlike most metro transit agencies, New York City has no control over the MTA, so he cannot make MTA release their data as part of the program.

I have specifically contacted Mayor Bloomberg’s office regarding this issue and encouraged them to roll this issue into his FixTheMTA campaign.

There is an interesting side-story to the SF data. Apparently the SFMTA had contracted a third party to manage some of its transit data for them, and an offshoot of that company started to make copyright claims against iPhone app developers who used that data (sound familiar?).

Apple had removed one of the apps, Routesy, out of the app store in response to the say-so – but later put it back in the store when it was made apparent the IP claims had no merit.

I suspect that this is one reason why Apple has not removed StationStops for iPhone from the app store after receiving the takedown letter from MTA – it got some significant heat for doing the same to Routesy, and is having its IP lawyers take a closer look at the specific legal claims made in takedown letters.

As for our current situation with MTA, we still await their response.

Last week they seemed interested in starting a dialog in return for my sales data – since we submitted it last Thursday, we have not heard from them.