Off the Rails: Who Owns a Public Timetable?
Moovit brought me back to public transport. The attempt to shut down Better Rail raises a bigger question about public data and public benefit.
Off the Rails
Originally published in Skip Intro on 6 September 2026. Time references and product descriptions reflect that edition.
One thing brought me back to public transport after two decades of boycotting it: the Moovit app. Not the buses or the trains themselves, but the real-time information that made it possible, for the first time in Israel, to stitch several routes and modes into one legible journey.
Moovit did the hard work. The gains went elsewhere: to me as a passenger, to a city with fewer cars idling in traffic, and to the transport operators who got my custom and my money.
Which is why I read with a mix of anger and disbelief about Israel Railways' attempt to shut down Better Rail, an app that serves up departure times rather more gracefully than the railway's own mediocre offering.
So, Israel Railways, step aside.
As a citizen who uses your service and pays for it, I want the railway's data open to anyone who wants it. It is not yours. It is mine, and everyone else's.
Better Rail is a free app built by a group of volunteers on top of the railway's own timetables. No adverts, no subscription, source code openly on GitHub. It does precisely what the official app is supposed to do, only faster and without raising your blood pressure.
In June 2026 the railway’s head of passenger information contacted the developers and told them to stop using the data interfaces. In August 2026 came a solicitors' letter demanding immediate removal from the app stores. The claims: intellectual property infringement over the timetables, unauthorised access, and server damage running to hundreds of thousands of shekels. The developers call it bullying. The railway will not elaborate, citing legal proceedings. Evidence for any of it is nowhere to be seen.
A public railway timetable is nobody's intellectual property. It is public information paid for out of public money. When someone builds something better on top of it, for free and in their own time, the right response is to open a proper API and say thank you. Not to instruct a solicitor.
