General Transit Feed Specification
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| Filename extension | .zip |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 27 September 2006 |
| Type of format | Transit schedule format |
| Extended from | CSV |
| Standard | De facto standard |
| Open format? | Yes, CC BY 3.0 |
| Website | [1] |
The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information.
What was to become GTFS started out as a side project of Google employee Chris Harrelson in 2005, who “monkeyed around with ways to incorporate transit data into Google Maps […] when he heard from Tim and Bibiana McHugh, married IT managers at TriMet, the transit agency for Portland, Ore[gon]”. McHugh is cited with being frustrated about finding transit directions in unfamiliar cities, while popular mapping services were already offering easy-to-use driving directions at the time.
Bibiana and Tim McHugh eventually got into contact with Google and provided the company with CSV exports of TriMet's schedule data. In December 2005, Portland became the first city to be featured in the first version of Google's “Transit Trip Planner”. In September 2006, five more US cities were added to the Google Transit Trip Planner, and the data format released as the Google Transit Feed Specification.
In the United States, there had not been any standard for public transit timetables prior to the advent of GTFS, not even a de-facto standard. According to long-time BART website manager Timothy Moore, before the advent of GTFS, BART had to provide different data consumers with different formats, making a standardized transit format very desirable. The publicly and freely available format specification, as well as the availability of GTFS schedules, quickly made developers base their transit-related software on the format. This resulted in “hundreds of useful and popular transit applications” as well as catalogues listing available GTFS feeds. Due to the common data format those applications adhere to, solutions do not need to be custom-tailored to one transit operator, but can easily be extended to any region where a GTFS feed is available.
Due to the wide use of the format, the “Google” part of the original name was seen as a misnomer “that makes some potential users shy away from adopting GTFS”. As a consequence, it was proposed to change the name of the specification to General Transit Feed Specification in 2009.
A GTFS feed is a collection of at least six, and up to 13 CSV files (with extension .txt) contained within a .zip file. Preferred character encoding is UTF-8. Together, the related CSV tables describe a transit system's scheduled operations as visible to riders. The specification is designed to be sufficient to provide trip planning functionality, but is also useful for other applications such as analysis of service levels and some general performance measures. In contrast to European transit industry exchange standards such as Transmodel or VDV-45X, GTFS only includes scheduled operations that are meant to be distributed to riders. It is also limited to scheduled information and does not include real-time information. However, real-time information can be related to GTFS schedules according to the related GTFS-realtime specification.
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