Hello,
I was told you were the person to contact about this. The current Route Planner is a great system, and along with the posted timetables and route maps, it helps me greatly in planning any sort of trip I need to take without a car in Ottawa. Like all systems, it has a lot of room for improvement. Many cities in North America have been switching over to Google Transit to display route information and travel planning. I think it would be great if OC Transpo's route data were given to Google Transit so that Ottawa residents and tourists could use Google to plan their trips. Google Transit is integrated with Google Maps to provide a clear visualization of where the bus routes and stops are. To see this in action, you can check out the Google Transit maps for Vancouver (http://www.google.com/transit?ie=UTF8&ll=49.188123,-122.922592&spn=0.175470,0.375594) and Montreal (http://www.google.com/transit?ie=UTF8&ll=45.555410,-73.623505&spn=0.743314,1.248322).
Google allows data to be added for Google Transit through the use of files sent to them containing data fitting their specification (http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html). I'm sure all the data required by Google for this process is available within OC Transpo, though not necessarily in the correct data format. It would not be difficult for a programmer to write a small program that converts and exports the data properly for Google's use, given proper access to the existing OC Transpo route and timetable database.
I think this would be great for Ottawa's travellers, and should be considered by those in control of OC Transpo's website and data. If it is not within the scope of the OC Transpo's budget to assign this task to its staff, I would personally be happy to take on the this task as a volunteer project, which would be a great experience in programming outside academia for me. I am a recent graduate of Carleton University in Computer Mathematics and as such have the necessary training to complete such a task, within a relatively short period of time. I hope you agree that this would be a beneficial addition to the route and timetable data that is already provided by OC Transpo.
Bryan English