GTFS: Making Public Transit Data Universally Accessible¶
The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is an Open Standard used to distribute relevant information about transit systems to riders. It allows public transit agencies to publish their transit data in a format that can be consumed by a wide variety of software applications. Today, the GTFS data format is used by thousands of public transport providers.
GTFS consists of two main parts: GTFS Schedule and GTFS Realtime. GTFS Schedule contains information about routes, schedules, fares, and geographic transit details, and it is presented in simple text files. This straightforward format allows for easy creation and maintenance without relying on complex or proprietary software.
GTFS Realtime contains trip updates, vehicle positions, and service alerts. It is based on Protocol Buffers, which are a language (and platform) neutral mechanism for serializing structured data.
GTFS is supported around the world and its use, importance, and scope has been increasing. It’s likely that an agency you know already uses GTFS to represent routes, schedule, stop locations, and other information, and that riders are already consuming it via various applications.