General Transit Feed Specification

Intro

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way.

Originally developed in collaboration between several staff at the city of Portland, USA's public transit agency TriMet and Google in 2005, and called the "Google Transit Feed Specification", the Google has since been replaced by General.

The format is now in relatively wide use around the world, although particularly in the USA. The importance of a de-facto standard for public transit information has been its ability to spur an ecosystem of app developers and projects, both proprietary and Open Source, to make use of the data. This makes public transit more accessible and amenable, which should support it being a more competitive option to the private car for transport.

There is also an emerging set of tools that use GTFS to allow analysis and communication of the quality of a public transport network, such as Mapnificent and OpenTripPlanner.

About the format

The GTFS is a relatively simple flat-file format, specifying agencies, routes, stops, and schedules for public transit in a region. For a quick visual overview of the format, see [this post on Martin Davis' blog].

There are tools to import the format into a relational database form such as [gtfsdb], and also either using this route or the JEQL query language, to export the relevant route information to GIS shapefiles (see [http://lin-ear-th-inking.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/extracting-gtfs-data-using-jeql.html here).

See also

• Wikipedia:General Transit Feed Specification
• Transport Informatics
• Open Source Transport Informatics tools - many of which rely/interoperate with GTFS as an information feed.
• The OSSTIP project

External Links

• Official references:
  • https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/
• Historical / big picture articles:
  • http://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/01/05/how-google-and-portlands-trimet-set-the-standard-for-open-transit-data/
  • http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/02/21/google-transit-a-search-giant-remaps-public-transportation
• Writeups about the use/potential of GTFS, or other GTFS manipulation tools:
  • http://bit.ly/uses-of-gtfs :- Paper by Aaron Antrim and Sean Barbeau on the uses of GTFS, primarily aimed at transit agencies.
  • http://bit.ly/leverage-gtfs :- Short paper by Trillium Solutions, again with a very good overview of GTFS uses, potential, tools and expert community.
  • https://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/OtherGTFSTools
• Agencies with GTFS feeds:
  • http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com/ - A list of public transit agencies with GTFS feeds.