Leveraging the General Transit Feed Specification for Efficient Transit Analysis

Abstract

Since 2007, the transit industry has benefited from a widely adopted data standard called the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), which has enabled the development of numerous traveler information tools (i.e., transit trip planners). The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the potential for GTFS feeds as a data source for transit analyses, such as those found in the Transit Capacity and Quality of Service Manual. There are three primary project tasks: an analysis of GTFS field usage by different agencies; an analysis of a single agency's operations at the stop, route, and system levels; and a batch analysis and comparison of 50 large transit agencies in North America. Compared with manually transcribing schedules from transit websites or parsing printed schedules, the use of scripts and database queries suggests that the GTFS is a highly efficient data source and proves the importance of broadly accepted data standards. The methodology documented in this paper and the open source scripts (made available online) will be useful for any analyst or researcher who has tasks related to the analysis of single or multiple transit systems at the stop, route, or system level.

Comparable Measures of Accessibility to Public Transport Using the General Transit Feed Specification

“…General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) has been used in recent transit research since Google structured and launched the open platform in 2008. Despite the limitation of spatial coverage of worldwide GTFS data, especially in the Global South [30], these standardized transit data have great potential as a source for efficient spatiotemporal transit analyses by using scripts and database queries [31], especially for comparing research between various cities. Shortest path routes along the transit network in the study area and travel times between specific nodes can be estimated by linking GTFS data files together with the ArcGIS Network Analyst Tools [32].…”

Human-Computer Interaction: Users and Contexts

“…As of 2012, there were no transit agencies in Georgia with open data and no source of real-time transit information (RTI) in the region, putting Atlanta behind the national trend toward providing open schedule data [43]. Unlike other cities where OBA was deployed, Atlanta did not have a large crossover between transit riders and technology advocates, therefore the transit agencies in the region had not yet been confronted with the idea of providing a higher-level of information to riders or of having third-party developers interested in working with their data.…”

Planning Support Systems and Smart Cities

“…It was originally developed by Google and Portland's Tri-met transit agency to allow for transit routing in Google maps (McHugh 2013). Beyond routing applications, there are also a number of open source analysis packages that use GTFS as the base (Wong 2013). We distributed the data on the GTFS exchange, a website repository for open transit data, as well as our website www.digitalmatatus.com, allowing anyone to access it and develop projects using it.…”