No news is good news?

I seldom take a train but what I read in the papers supports my little experience: you don’t get much for your tax dollars with Sydney’s trains.

If I ran Sydney’s lamentable railway service I would be falling over myself to help commuters. I might hand out plastic seat covers so they could sit with confidence that their trousers weren’t soaking up last night’s vomit; or I might give them free newspapers so they had something to read other than the smutty  graffiti encouraged by discounted student travel.

What I would not be doing is paying lawyers to menace iPhone app developers who are doing nothing more sinsister than offering rail timetables in a contemporary form. I wouldn’t be doing it for at least three reasons:

Firstly, I’d probably be very, very busy trying to clean up the trains and get them to be punctual. I wouldn’t have time to be threatening commuters and developers with legal action.

Secondly, I’d probably be too embarrassed to spend even more taxpayer money than I already do, especially on lawyers threatening some of the few supporters I do have.

Thirdly, I’d think to myself: hang on, this will save me a dollar or two on developing my own application (see above point about frittering away taxpayers’ money).

“RailCorp’s primary concern is that our customers receive accurate, up-to-date timetable information,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.

“This includes details of service interruptions, special event services, trackwork and other changes. Third-party RailCorp timetable applications may contain inaccuracies and have the potential to mislead our customers.” via SMH

This is certainly a sensible argument with which one can’t find fault. After all, on the few occasions I have taken the train I have seen RailCorp staff running around with red pens offering to update commuters’ hard copies and printouts of timetables with details of “service interruptions, special events services, trackwork and other changes.” In fact, RailCorp has disabled the “print version” feature of its online timetable so you can never have anything but an up-to-the-minute electronic version. Hang on, no they haven’t, my mistake. But this is all very sensible nonetheless. Really. Why on earth should the public be able to take public information from a public service and make it available to the public? Christ almighty, next step End Times.

Contrast Railcorp’s thick-headed approach to this issue with the Bureau of Meterology’s enlighted embrace of Graham Dawson’s OzWeather iPhone app. As Graham told our packed-like-a-5.17-commuter-service seminar Entering the Mobile Ecosystem, BOM simply forks over its data to him, no charge, no drama, no issues.

It’s almost as if BOM thinks to itself, “We’re paid for by the public, maybe the information we generate by spending that money should, you know, belong to the public.” Communists.

Maybe, and here’s some real craziness, RailCorp should be spending its time and money making the trains run on time, not worrying the public might be “misled” if iPhone app developers give them access to the published timetable. Or, and now my brain is really starting to hurt, they help these guys to incorporate up-to-the-minute information into the app because it is, you know, web-enabled so that would be an — argh! the pain, the pain! — a win-win.