Shapes
Shapes can be defined and associated with trips, enabling trip planning applications to display trips on a map and inform riders of the distance they need to travel in a transit vehicle. The shape_dist_traveled fields are used to programmatically determine how much of a shape to draw when showing a map to riders.
When defining shapes, there is a balance between their level of detail (e.g. following the exact curvature of roads) and conveying only the necessary information efficiently.
| Files included |
Fields included |
| shapes.txt |
shape_id, shape_pt_lat, shape_pt_lon, shape_pt_sequence, shape_dist_traveled |
| trips.txt |
shape_id |
| stop_times.txt |
shape_dist_traveled |
Sample data
The following table shows a portion of a shape from the TriMet GTFS feed (download it here).
shapes.txt
| shape_id |
shape_pt_lat |
shape_pt_lon |
shape_pt_sequence |
shape_dist_traveled |
| 558674 |
45.47623 |
-122.721885 |
1 |
0.0 |
| 558674 |
45.476235 |
-122.72236 |
2 |
121.9 |
| 558674 |
45.476237 |
-122.722523 |
3 |
163.7 |
| 558674 |
45.476242 |
-122.723024 |
4 |
292.2 |
| 558674 |
45.476244 |
-122.72316 |
5 |
327.1 |
stop_times.txt
| trip_id |
stop_sequence |
shape_dist_traveled |
| 13302375 |
1 |
0 |
| 13302375 |
2 |
461.7 |
| 13302375 |
3 |
1245 |