Mobility.data - GTFS

The website and entity acting as reference to help operators and public transport authority to produce maintain and broadcast GTFS data sets

https://mobilitydata.org/

Travelers need mobility apps.

Mobility apps need high-quality data.

Data is fundamental to realizing mobility as a service — providing travelers convenient means of discovering, accessing, and paying for mobility services. MobilityData improves data formats that make useful apps possible.

Our goals

• Broaden adoption of standardized formats so mobility data is available throughout the world.


• Increase completeness of data formats so that more service features can be represented in apps.


• Enhance the accuracy and quality of data to ensure that the information travelers see in an app matches the real world.

How we are doing this

MobilityData builds on and accelerates existing successes with the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS, including its real-time extensions) and other mobility data formats.

GTFS governance follows a bottom-up model. The organizations producing and consuming data drive the addition of specification features. To adopt a new feature, it has to first be tested in software, ensuring that new features are practical and grounded in real use cases.

The grassroots governance model ensures buy in for new features. MobilityData sustains this model — and accelerates the process to keep pace with mobility industry needs. MobilityData provides facilitation and leadership to enhance specifications through existing technical communities, building off Rocky Mountain Institute’s GTFS Best Practices project.

Our work

MobilityData’s planned first year of work focuses exclusively on improving schedule and real-time public transit data. In future years, MobilityData aims to improve data for other functions and modes.

Planned through July 2019:

Community management: The MobilityData team is curating existing proposals to change GTFS, and field new incoming questions and proposals.

Make GTFS more clear: Resolve known issues and inconsistencies in GTFS, publish how-to guides for GTFS, and update GTFS Best Practices, adding real-time.

Add features to GTFS to describe more transit services and features [links to draft specifications are in brackets]:

• Demand-responsive transit [GTFS-flex]
• Unplanned service changes, such as detours or replacement shuttles. [GTFS-ServiceChanges]
• Vehicle and station facility features for step-free accessible transit [GTFS-pathways and GTFS-vehicles]
• [Fare] structures and travel restrictions
• Line & service, and operator names (branding)

 

Make industry practices and research on transit data easier to discover, including:

• Benefits of real-time information
• Transit data libraries and tools
• Data practices throughout the world