Exploring the time geography of public transport networks with the gtfs2gps package

Abstract

The creation of the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) in the mid-2000s provided a new data format for cities to organize and share digital information on their public transport systems. GTFS feeds store geolocated data on public transport networks, including information on routes, stops, timetables, and service levels. The GTFS standard is now widely adopted by thousands of transport authorities and a wide variety of software applications for different purposes, including trip planning, timetable creation and accessibility analysis. Yet, there is still a lack of tools to parse GTFS data in a way that allows one to analyze the complex spatial and temporal patterns of public transport systems. This paper presents gtfs2gps, a new computational tool to easily process GTFS data that allows one to analyze the space-time trajectories of public transport vehicles at fine spatial and temporal resolutions. gtfs2gps is an open-source R package that employs parallel computing to convert GTFS feeds from relational text files into a data table format similar to GPS records with the timestamps of vehicles in every single trip. This paper explains the package functionalities and demonstrates how gtfs2gps can be used to articulate key concepts in time geography to explore and visualize the spatial and temporal patterns of public transport networks. The paper is accompanied by a computational notebook in R Markdown that allows one to easily reproduce the results in this paper or even replicate the analysis and data visualizations for other contexts where GTFS data is available. Given the widespread use of GTFS by transport agencies, gtfs2gps opens new possibilities for researchers to examine the time geography of public transport systems in urban areas across the globe.

GTFS Segments: A Fast and Efficient Library to Generate Bus Stop Spacings

“…Once every stop has been snapped to a geo-coordinate on the route shape, the shape is segmented between stops and each segment's geometry is stored in a GeoDataFrame. Packages such as gtfs2gps (Pereira et al, 2023) and gtfs_functions (Toso & Oja, 2023) also compute segments. In addition to its snapping algorithm, visualization, download, and statistical functionalities, gtfs-segments is distinguished from those in two ways.…”

“…The gtfs-segments package draws its inspiration from gtfs_functions (Toso & Oja, 2023), gtfs2gps (Pereira et al, 2023), and partridge (Whalen, 2023) repositories. We thank the contributors of these packages for their excellent work.…”

Estimating public transport emissions from General Transit Feed Specification data

“…The model assumes a constant average speed between consecutive stops, although the speed of vehicles can vary between segments of the same route and across routes according to the GTFS input data. The step-by-step computational process of the transport model is presented in more detail by Pereira et al (2022).…”