Transit
Data standards, APIs, apps, tools, datasets, and research around open source technology of public transit.
Contents
- GTFS Courses
- GTFS Libraries
- GTFS Analysis Tools
- GTFS Converters
- GTFS Data Collection and Maintenance Tools
- GTFS Merge Tools
- GTFS Validators
- GTFS Realtime Libraries & Demo Apps
- GTFS Realtime (and Other Real-time API) Archival Tools
- SIRI
- GTFS Realtime Convertors
- GTFS Realtime Utilities
- Widely adopted
- Pilot or development stage
- Software for Creating APIs
- GTFS Timetable Publishing Tools
LLMs
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.
An implementation of GPT-Neo, a large open-source transformer language model.
Large Model Training
State-of-the-art Machine Learning for Professional Developers, Researchers, and Engineers.
A deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training easy, efficient, and effective.
Frameworks
3D Vision
Image Classification
Natural Language Processing
Deep Learning
Deployment and Optimization
Distributed Computing
Reinforcement Learning
Research Projects
Producing Data
GTFS Courses
GTFS Libraries
C library for reading static GTFS feeds. Supports reading unpacked feeds into application memory or into SQLite databases.
RRRR (usually pronounced R4) is a C-language implementation of the RAPTOR public transit routing algorithm.
C++17 header-only library for reading and writing GTFS (used in Valhalla). Main features: fast reading and writing of GTFS feeds, support for extended GTFS route types, simple working with GTFS Date and Time formats.
A Java-based library for reading, writing, and transforming public transit data in the GTFS format, including database support.
Utilities to process GTFS data sets (e.g., "flattening" calendar.txt & calendar_dates.txt, computing arrival/departure times of trips).
Loads transit data from GTFS files, unzips it and stores it to a SQLite database. Provides some methods to query for agencies, routes, stops and times.
Python package with useful functions to create geo-spatial visualizations from GTFS feeds.
Python package that represents GTFS data for buses in a concise tabular manner using segments.
An open source library in python for reading GTFS files and computing various stats and indicators about Public Transport networks.
Repository-like tool in Python to manage and update a huge number of GTFS feeds.
Public transport network analysis and travel time computations using Python3. Compatible with Postgres/PostGIS, Oracle, MySQL, and SQLite. Used by gtfspy-webviz.
A Python GTFS library that supports reading individual GTFS tables, or constructing a graph to represent each agency in a feed.
TransitGPT is a Generative AI-powered chatbot that enables transit enthusiasts to access and analyze General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data through natural language instructions.
R functions to search, discover, and access transit feed data from the Mobility Database.
Ruby script that converts a set of GTFS files into a SQLite database + GeoJSONs (needed by the Transit Map web application)
GTFS Analysis Tools
Tools for working with public transit data in ArcGIS
A Python 3.6+ tool kit for analyzing General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data. Supersedes GTFSTK.
An R package to read GTFS data into tibbles and simple features dataframes to map transit stops and routes, calculate travel times and transit frequencies, and validate transit feeds.
A set of convenient tools for editing and analysing transit feeds in GTFS format in R.
A Python library for converting transit data into a directed graph for network analysis.
A Java-based routing engine developed by Conveyal for multimodal (transit/bike/walk/car) networks. It currently plans many trips over a time window for scenario planning and analytics purposes. A related R wrapper package (r5r) is developed independently by IPEA. See also the performance comparison from Higgins et al. (2022), linked below.
An R package for constructing and modelling a transit network in real time to obtain vehicle ETAs
Inference of probabilistic schedules from empirical data about transit vehicles.
Creates stringline charts showing all vehicles on a transit route from GTFS data.
A Python library for converting GTFS data into graph representations for network analysis and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Supports loading GTFS feeds, constructing transit graphs, network centrality analysis, and isochrone-based accessibility analysis on multimodal (street + transit) networks.
GTFS Converters
Command-line tool to extract pathways as GeoJSON from a GTFS dataset.
Command-line tool to extract shapes as GeoJSON from a GTFS dataset.
A Java tool for synchronizing data in GTFS format with OpenStreetMap.org.
The GTFS-PARSER library is a library to allow javascript to parse gtfs and create geojson on client or server.
Compute a transit service area from static GTFS. Results are output as single-layer .geojson files. Dockerized version of gtfs-to-geojson.
A Python script to generate a single geoJSON shape for each transit route in a GTFS archive.
Javascript tool that converts transit data in GTFS shapes and stops into geoJSON. This is useful for creating maps of transit routes.
An R package that converts public transportation data in GTFS format to GPS-like records in a data.table, where each row represents the timestamp of each vehicle at a given spatial resolution.
An R package to estimate the emission levels of public transport vehicles based on General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data.
general transit (GTFS) simple (geographic) features (sf) in R. can be used to convert from GTFS to Shapefile, GeoJSON, and other formats through GDAL.
Hafas2GTFS converter written in Python, optimized for SBB HAFAS feeds.
Javascript tool to convert polylines from a KML file into a GTFS shapes.txt file. Hosted on GitHub here.
Converts NeTEX datasets into GTFS datasets. The input NeTEx datasets are required to follow the Nordic NeTEx Profile.
Converts French-Transmodel, SIRI, NETeX, HAFAS, HASTUS, VDV452, and more.
A Java tool to create a Barefoot mapfile from a GTFS file.
A Java library for working with transit data in the VDV format, including converting VDV-452 schedule data into GTFS.
A Rust library to convert to/from the following formats: GTFS, NTFS (for Navitia, see Software for Creating APIs), TransXChange (UK specification), KV1 (NL specification), NeTEx (EU specification).
Python application that attempts to assign GTFS stopids to TransLoc IDs using TransLoc's API (TransLoc doesn't provide GTFS stopids in their API).
Imports and syncs (Transmodel) BISON Koppelvlak1, IFF (a format written by HP/EDS, somewhat similiar to ATCO CIF) to import timetables of the railway networks. The internal pseudo-NETeX datastructure allows to export to GTFS and there are proof-of-concepts to export to other formats such as NETeX, GTFS and IFF.
TransXChange to GTFS converter written in Objective-C.
GTFS Data Collection and Maintenance Tools
Python script that generates missing shapes.txt for GTFS using routing from Google Maps Directions API or OSRM.
A Python tool to convert GTFS blocks, defined by setting trip.block_id into a series of trip-to-trip transfers (proposal).
A (self-hosted) web-based GTFS editing framework. (Note: this project has been deprecated in favor of IBI Data Tools).
A (self-hosted) browser-based user interface for creating, editing, exporting static GTFS (see related post).
An open source web and mobile application for collecting transit data. Use it to create GTFS feeds, capture passenger counts or generate GIS datasets.
A web application that handles GTFS editing, validating, quality checking, and deploying to OpenTripPlanner. (Combines and builds upon the functionality of the deprecated
A tool to quickly setup and run a local instance of the above IBI Data Tools project.
Python tool that fits GTFS shape files and stops to a given OSM map file. Uses pymapmatch for the matching.
UI tool to help build the internal structure of stations (including pathways.txt)
A command-line tool that reads GTFS stop names out loud using Text-to-Speech to determine which need Text-to-Speech values for ttsstopname in stops.txt.
A free tool that helps transit agencies easily create, manage, and export their transportation data in GTFS-Flex format.
GTFS Merge Tools
GTFS Validators
Validates the presence of accessiblity-related fields and files in a GTFS file. Can be a command line tool or node.js package.
A Java-based GTFS validator based on the OneBusAway GTFS Modules, runs in Java and is faster than the Google provided one.
Conveyal's successor to their own gtfs-validator, a Java-based library for loading and saving GTFS feeds of arbitrary size with disk-backed storage.
A Data Package specification with validation accomplished with Good Tables. Includes a data package, schemas, tests, and uses South East Queensland GTFS data as an example.
A tool for checking, sanitizing, and minimizing GTFS feeds. Fork of gtfstidy, with some additional fixes that haven't been merged upstream yet.
This Python package is a thin wrapper around MobilityData/gtfs-validator that handles intermediate files produced and finds gtfs-validator's output file so it can be given a specific name or returned as a string.
An open-source GTFS validator implemented in Java licensed under GPLv3 maintained by Mecatran.
A open-source GTFS validator canonically following the GTFS spec implemented in Java licensed under Apache v2.0 maintained by MobilityData.
GTFS Realtime Libraries & Demo Apps
GTFS Realtime (and Other Real-time API) Archival Tools
A Python tool that supports reading and archiving GTFS-realtime feeds into a database
A Python application that collects real-time data from the Nextbus API and archives it into the GTFS format (i.e., retrospective GTFS).
SIRI
A Java-based command-line utility to convert from the SIRI format to GTFS-realtime.
Automatically generated documentation from the (incredibly well) annotated SIRI 2.0 Schema Definition.
Java-based tool to convert King County Metros Legacy AVL format to SIRI.
An open-source Android library for interacting with the RESTful SIRI interface for real-time transit data, such as that currently being used by the MTA Bus Time API.
Android-compatible Plain Old Java Objects (POJOSs) used for data binding (deserliazing XML/JSON) responses for SIRI v1.3 APIs. Used by the SIRI REST Client.
GTFS Realtime Convertors
A Java-based command-line utility that extracts vehicle positions and trip updates information from an OrbCAD SQL Server and exports them to the GTFS-realtime TripUpdates and VehiclePositions formats.
A Java-based command-line utility to convert from the NextBus API format to GTFS-realtime. Note that NextBus now directly offers a GTFS-realtime API for their products. See Cubic site and this FAQ.
A Java-based command-line utility to convert from the Syncromatics API format to GTFS-realtime TripUpdates and VehiclePositons.
Java-based tool to process incoming KV6,15,17 and ARNU and match them to static transit data present in a RID integration database. It then proceeds to export this data as ARNU RITinfo, GTFS(realtime) and KV78turbo
Java-based tool to convert from WMATA's BusPositions API and Alert RSS feeds from MetroAlerts to GTFS-realtime TripUpdates, VehiclePositions, and Alerts feeds.
Java-based tool to convert SEPTA's real-time bus and rail data to GTFS-realtime
Extract real-time info from DDOT's TransitMaster installation (database) and convert to GTFS-realtime
Extracts data from Ride On's OrbCAD database and export as GTFS-realtime.
Screen-scrapes KCATA’s TransitMaster WebWatch installation to produce a GTFS-realtime feed.
Java application that can consume raw vehicle positions and generate prediction times in formats such as GTFS-realtime. Formerly known as "Transitime".
A Python-based tool to translate custom arrival API formats to GTFS-realtime. As of July 2019 it supports LA Metro and SEPTA.
A Node.js based tool to convert the Transloc API to GTFS-realtime.
A Javascript tool to generate a GTFS Realtime feed from a HAFAS endpoint.
GTFS Realtime Utilities
A Kalman Filter used to interpolate bus travel times using NYC MTA real-time data.
Combines realtime transit information from multiple sources into single output files. Maintained by Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA).
A tool for mocking GTFS-realtime feed content (e.g., for use in testing a GTFS-realtime consuming application).
Provides a Munin plugin for logging information about a GTFS-realtime feed.
Java-based utility to print out information from a GTFS-realtime file or URL.
Javascript tool to transform a continuous GTFS Realtime stream of DIFFERENTIAL incrementality data into a FULL_DATASET dump.
Converts protocol buffer format to plain text for easy viewing of a GTFS-realtime feed in plain text (for debugging purposes)
Web app to inspect & analyze any (CORS-enabled) GTFS Realtime feed. Open-source on GitHub.
A data pipeline developed for the TfNSW's GTFS Static and Realtime datasets. The datasets generated using the pipeline have been used to validate the performance of TfNSW's Transit Signal Priority Request via Public Transport Information and Priority System (PTIPS).
A Go-based tool that serves a GTFS-RT feed created from editable JSON.
Javascript tool to read a GTFS Realtime feed from stdin, print human-readable or as JSON.
Uses GTFS and GTFS-RT vehicle position feed generating an estimated transition time it takes for each vehicle to move from scheduled stop to scheduled stop recording these an "observedstoptime" table. These records can later be used to train a machine learning model to make vehicle travel predictions. Created by TriMet as part of an FTA IMI project.
A Java project that uses the gtfs-realtime-validator to assess the quality of a large number of transit feeds, fetching the feed URLs from a global directory (TransitFeeds.com/OpenMobilityData.org).
Widely adopted
Functions to interface with GBFS feeds in R, allowing users to save and accumulate tidy .rds datasets for specified cities/bikeshare programs.
Mobility Data Specification: A format to implement realtime data sharing, measurement and regulation for municipalities and mobility as a service providers. It is meant to ensure that governments have the ability to enforce, evaluate and manage providers. Maintained by the Open Mobility Foundation.
Pilot or development stage
A GTFS-based travel demand data format focusing on individual passenger demand suitable for dynamic network modeling developed by San Francisco County Transportation Authority, LMZ LLC, and UrbanLabs LLC.
(Under development - see this post) Data for individual passenger trajectories.
A GTFS-based transit network format for vehicle and capacity data suitable for dynamic transit modeling developed by Puget Sound Regional Council, UrbanLabs LLC, LMZ LLC, and San Francisco County Transportation Authority.
An open, fixed-route transit ridership data standard developed through a partnership between the Oregon Department of Transportation and Oregon State University.
An extension to a GTFS transit network with additional files that contain performance data developed by UrbanLabs LLC and San Francisco County Transportation Authority.
General Modeling Network Specification: A format for sharing routable road network files designed to be used in multi-modal static and dynamic transportation planning and operations models. Volpe/FHWA partnership with Zephyr Foundation.
interface for exchanging information between a travel information system and a sharing system (carshare, bikeshare).
Managed and Tolled Lanes Feed Specification: Proposal for a schema that comprise the Managed and Tolled Lanes Tolling Feed Specification (MTLFS) and defines the fields used in all of those files developed by Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.
A set of open documents and test suite that defines a MaaS-compatible API.
A structured collection of two-dimensional array objects and associated metadata, for possible use in the transportation modeling industry.
Open Sales and Distribution Model: Aims to substantially simplify the booking process for customers of rail trips and to lower complexity and distribution costs for distributors and railway carriers. Contains a specification of an offline model and on-line API. Maintained by the International Union of Railways (UIC).
Software for Creating APIs
Open source routing engine for OpenStreetMap. Use it as Java library or server.
A web server, written in Rust that uses PostGIS as a backend to serve GTFS data via a HTTP endpoint
Multi Objective Travel Information System, written in C++ and Java. Can consume schedule timetables in the GTFS or HAFAS format as well as real time information in the GTFS-RT (and RISML, a propriatary format at Deutsche Bahn) as input data. For pedestrian routing (handled by Per Pedes Routing) and car routing (handled by OSRM) OpenStreetMap data is used.
Sharing Data
Sample GTFS and GTFS Realtime datasets used for software testing
Proprietary (non-standard) vendor APIs
3rd party GTFS URL directories
Transit agency data archives
National government datasets
Using Data
Much faster than the code-davinci-002 model, can perform simple tasks like code completion and generation.
Transit Network Explorer Tool (TNExT) is a web-based software tool developed for the visualization, analysis, and reporting of regional and statewide transit networks in the state of Oregon.
Serves any GTFS feed as a JSON API. Transit agencies and developers alike can deploy the open source code to their own Heroku server.
Pinpoints the nearest authorized restroom for bus operator and field staff, using GPS and on-screen map.
This application supports the District's training operations for transportation and maintenance employees, primarily in the positions of Bus Operators and Heavy Duty Coach Mechanics (Apprentice and Journey), although the system supports new courses and apprenticeship programs.
Public transit ticketing system for customer issues and feedback with: inter-departmental routing with notifications, department/person assigments, simple workflow, ticket searching, pre-canned reports, daily reminders and more.
An open-source asset management platform for public transportation agencies.
An open-source Computer Aided Scheduling and Dispatch (CASD) software system to meet the needs of small scale human service transportation agencies.
An R Shiny app to ingest ridership time series, and return seasonal, trend, and residual components according to STL methodology and forecasts including uncertainty based on those components. Sponsored by Metro Transit (Minneapolis-St. Paul).
Web Apps (open source)
A Google Web Toolkit-based web interface for OpenTripPlanner
A Javascript-based client for OpenTripPlanner (no longer under development)
React Javascript component library, which can be used to build trip planner webapps. See the Storybook for a demo.
A Java-based web application for producing GTFS-realtime Service Alerts.
HRT Bus API publishes real time bus data from Hampton Roads Transit through an application programming interface for developers to make apps from it.
Web app that animates vehicles (markers) on a map using the public transport timetables to interpolate their positions along the routes (polylines).
Creates a customizable web map layer of transit routes using Leaflet or D3.
Shows shuttle arrival times for Google I/O conference, based on the open-source transport-tracker project. Note: To implement this yourself, you need a Google Maps APIs Premium Plan license.
A virtual “trip aggregator” that assembles information on a wide variety of available modes: public transit, private, rail, rideshare, carpool, volunteer, paratransit, and walking and biking.
Public transport real-time monitoring with WebSocket updates. Open-source on GitHub.
Scripts to create a Docker container that encapsulates all the elements necessary to develop map tiles for use on MBTA.com
Native Apps (open source)
An adaptive mobile transit app that shows real-time bus arrival information developed and deployed by Carnegie Mellon University. Written using Ionic framework. No longer maintained.
App (Desktop and Android) for planning trips. It can find public transport routes, store them offline, add events to your trips, see the floor plan of train stations, and much more. Souce Code, GitHub
A bus tracker app for Android devices for the MACS Transit system in Fairbanks, Alaska. Uses RouteMatch APIs.
A React-native mobile app for searching train schedules published by the Shore Line East transit agency in Connecticut. Relies on a deployment of the Next Train API.
An Android app that provides trip planning, schedules, live departure times, and disruption information for transport authorities in Europe and beyond.
A Kotlin Multiplatform library for making API requests and parsing responses from an OpenTripPlanner v2 server for trip plans, bike rental info, and server metadata for Android, iOS, and web.
Hardware
SDKs
Visualizations
Interactive GTFS route and schedule animation (for U.S. cities) using Mapbox GL JS, Deck.gl and Transitland. Github repository here.
A python Pandas script that combines Ridership/APC, Swiftly speed and dwell data, bus stop inventory, GTFS, and geospatial shapes to create a stop by stop, route by route, time grouping filterable dataset for cross-analyses. The dataset is then visualized in Tableau to help VTA Planners find places to make bus and rail network faster and more reliable through speedups methods like stop consolidation and dedicated lanes.
Web application for animation and visualization of GTFS data using gtfspy.
Open-source NodeJS application for visualizing the routes of GTFS datasets.
Shows areas you can reach with public transport in a given time. Open-source on GitHub, live at https://www.mapnificent.net/.
An online example of how to create a transit website all from your gtfs on Github
A Java application that visualizes transit, biking and walking accessibility across the city of Toronto. Uses a modified version of R5 for routing.