The development of Google’s free online transit trip planner has been one of the most exciting developments in transit for many years. Transit agencies that store trip information into a specific file format (the General Transit Feed Specification) and forward the data to Google’s transit team will have a robust, recognizable online trip planner for free. But perhaps equally exciting is the impact of the open data architecture, which is not hidden under the veil of proprietary software and has spurred many other developments, including extending the usefulness of the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) through the development of applications that leverage the GTFS data to further benefit transit agencies. This project identified opportunities to use GTFS data to support service planning and operational activity. The opportunities are limited to service‐level evaluations, given the static nature of the GTFS data. Nonetheless, GTFS data can be used to support service planning efforts. Furthermore, the project identified opportunities to supplement the GTFS with performance‐related information and developed a prototype application that integrated GTFS data with an automatic passenger counter (APC).

https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/39780/dot_39780_DS1.pdf

Expanding the Google Transit Feed Specification to Support Operations and Planning

This Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) project developed a tool, the Dynamic Timetable Generator, that enables transit agencies to dynamically generate timetables for customer web access directly from "raw" schedule data. New technologies enable the development of a tool that dynamically loads timetable data from a batch file or from a database, translates the data to a standard content and format, and then presents the information to the public in specified languages and in a variety of accessible display formats. Tri-Met (Portland, Oregon), New York State Department of Transportation with Suffolk County Transit, and the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) in Chicago participated in this project and tested the application.

Paula Okunieff

Papers

Dynamic Timetable Generator