Which Local Governments Adopt New Technology First? Agency Size and Organizational Champions for Open Transit Data

Which local governments are first to adopt new technology to improve public service delivery? We develop a bureaucracy-driven account, arguing that agencies are constrained by their size, resources, and employee motivations. This means that efforts to adopt new technologies are more likely to succeed in larger agencies. We assess support for this argument by examining the adoption and use of online scheduling information for public transit (the General Transit Feed Specification [GTFS]), which makes transit far easier to use. In California, we find that large agencies where internal champions faced fewer technical and resource constraints outpaced smaller ones. Interview and survey evidence provide support for the mechanisms underpinning our theory. These results underscore the importance of studying organizational drivers of technology and policy adoption more broadly. They also suggest caveats to the decentralization and federalism literatures, which emphasize the citizen oversight and influence is typically greater in smaller jurisdictions.