General Transit Feed Specification

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General Transit Feed Specification
File extension : .zip
Initial release: September 27, 2006
Extended by: CSV
Standard (s) : De facto standard
Website : developers.google.com

The General Transit Feed Specification ( GTFS ) defines a digital exchange format for public transport timetables and related geographical information, such as: B. the locations of stops.

history

The later GTFS format began in 2005 as a side project of Google employee Chris Harrelson, who “was playing around with ways to integrate local traffic data into Google Maps [...] when he found out about the married IT managers Tim and Bibiana McHugh, who worked for the transport company TriMet in Portland worked ”. McHugh was also frustrated with the problem of getting public transport information in unfamiliar cities - while online map services were already offering easy-to-use route planners for automobile travel at the time.

After initial contact, the McHugh couple supplied Google with CSV exports of the TriMet timetables. In December 2005, Portland became the first city to be included in the initial version of Google's Transit Trip Planner . Five more US cities followed in September 2006, and the data format used was published as the Google Transit Feed Specification .

In contrast to Europe, there had been no standardization efforts for timetable data for public transport in the United States up to that point, and there was also no uniform industry standard. The longtime BART website manager Timothy Moore is quoted as saying that before the introduction of GTFS, BART supplied different users of their timetable data with different data formats, which made a uniform data format very desirable. The publicly freely available GTFS format specification as well as the availability of various timetable data records in GTFS format led software developers to base their applications on this format. The result of this development has been "hundreds of useful and widespread mass transit applications" and directory services for available GTFS feeds. Since all these applications were based on a uniform data format, they were no longer tailored to a specific transport company or a specific transport association, but could simply be extended to any region for which a GTFS feed was available.

Due to the widespread use of the format, the “Google” in the specification's original name was seen as a misnomer “that could discourage some potential users from adopting GTFS”. As a result, in 2009 it was proposed to rename the data format to General Transit Feed Specification .

structure

Simplified GTFS class diagram
Simplified GTFS class diagram

A GTFS “feed” is a collection of at least six and up to 15 CSV files (with the file extension .txt) that are combined in a ZIP archive . According to the specification, the CSV files should preferably be created in UTF-8 format.

All CSV files together form an image of a relational database , which the publicly viewable schedule of a transport company or -verbundes reproduces. In contrast to European industry standards for public transport exchange formats such as Transmodel or VDV -45X, GTFS only contains target timetables that are intended for passengers. In contrast to GTFS, the more powerful industrial formats are also designed to model empty trips, vehicle rotations or duty rosters, for example .

The GTFS Realtime extension exists to enrich a timetable information system with real-time data and temporary timetable changes .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Wade Roush: Welcome to Google transit: How (and why) the search giant is remapping public transportation Archived from the original on March 24, 2016. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Community Transportation . 2012. Retrieved March 14, 2016. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / web1.ctaa.org
  2. ↑ a b Lauren Dyson, Brett Goldstein, Abhi Nemani: Beyond Transparency . Code for America Press, 2013, pp. 125-135.
  3. ↑ Avichal Garg: Public Transit via Google . Retrieved March 14, 2016.
  4. ↑ Chris Harrelson: Happy Trails with Google Transit . Retrieved March 14, 2016.
  5. ^ Joe Hughes: proposal: remove "Google" from the name of GTFS . Google Groups. Retrieved March 14, 2016.
  6. ^ Stefan Kaufmann: Opening Public Transit in Germany . A status quo. 2014, p. 36–37 (English, dbis.eprints.uni-ulm.de [PDF; 9.0 MB ]).
  7. ↑ What is GTFS realtime? . Google .