Open government via Google

With reference to Better Transit Information:

In general one of the best things a city can do these days is simply open information flows up so that third parties can develop interesting applications. If Google can access your city's public transit scheduling data, then people can use Google Transit to figure out how to get where they're going and your agency doesn't need to worry about coming up with a better map-making program than Google's. But by the same token, if some rival firm does invent a "better than Google" mapping program, they'll be able to access your data too and launch a competing product.(emphasis added)

Absolutely so. The issue far transcends transit, Google maps etc and into open government. I'd love to see the City of Seattle. which is the only local government I watch very carefully and which largely drives me nuts, open up its data base(s) (and virtually everything the city does is on that data base and has been for years) to Google et al. 

Then we'd have real open government and the City might even save some money by minimizing its own web page efforts.