NY City Council Member Gale A. Brewer has asked the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to publish up-to-date schedules and standardize their public data, noting that information currently available on the Web to commuters is in PDF format.  Standardizing and making this data public would, in her opinion,  allow software developers to create applications for mobile devices which could then be accessed by commuters. 

In her letter reviewed by NYConvergence to Helena E. Williams, the MTA's interim executive director and CEO, where she makes this request, Brewer adds that MTA Chief of Marketing & Advertising Mark Heavey has informed her office that the only current MTA policy is preventing the creation of an online feed.