Many people living in Brussels don't have a car. Is it fair that taxpayer money is used for highways, while people without a car cannot use them?
I’m one of those car-less people, and I much appreciate having the infrastructure of roads to cycle on. Some highways even have a cycling lane. Everyone who eats uses that infra.
You can complain about this how much you want, you also need to be realistic. Governments in Belgium are known to be highly inefficient, to you really expect them to create free software?
Belgium was sensible enough to write an open data law, whereby the gov is required to make data their data publicly accessible (e.g. train schedules rely on this and irail.be demonstrates). Software is even easier because there are software forges that make it more trivial than sharing a database. Inefficiency would benefit from FOSS devs. They could even just focus on the API and perhaps audit the app’s public development.
(by the way, do you have any source on this? I'm curious)
There was a FOSDEM talk about it, I think around 2018ish. Italy would likely be in the title in the archives.