About¶
GTFS.org is the central documentation platform for the General Transit Feed Specification. This site and its contents are maintained by MobilityData.
Thank you to Andrew Byrd for purchasing and lending use of the GTFS.org domain name and providing leadership for the community.
Contributing to GTFS.org¶
To propose edits to the content of this website, contact MobilityData at documentation@mobilitydata.org or visit the GTFS.org GitHub Repository to submit your edits as pull requests.
Regarding translations, GTFS.org uses an automated tool to ensure translations are kept up to date with repository changes. Please note that since our priority is to keep translations up-to-date, any translation corrected manually in any language will eventually be overwritten.
We do accept glossary changes for key terms that are commonly used across GTFS.org, like trip or station. If you want to suggest a translation for a key term that should be applied across the entire site, you can create an issue on the GTFS.org GitHub Repository.
GTFS evolution¶
GTFS started with a collaboration between TriMet in Portland, Oregon, and Google. TriMet worked with Google to format their transit data into an easily maintainable and consumable format that could be imported into Google Maps. This transit data format was originally known as the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS).
As a result of developer innovation, GTFS data is now being used by a variety of third-party software applications for many different purposes, including trip planning, timetable creation, mobile data, data visualization, accessibility, and analysis tools for planning.
In 2010, the GTFS format name was changed to the General Transit Feed Specification to accurately represent its use in many different applications outside of Google products. Real-time information capabilities were added to the specification with the creation of GTFS Realtime in 2011, and in 2019, the non-profit MobilityData was established to further maintain GTFS with the help of the community.
Among public transportation data formats, GTFS stands out because it was conceived to meet specific, practical needs in communicating service information to passengers, not as an exhaustive vocabulary for managing operational details. It is designed to be relatively simple to create and read for both people and machines.
For further background on the origins of GTFS, see Pioneering Open Data Standards: The GTFS Story and How Google and Portland’s TriMet Set the Standard for Open Transit Data in Streetsblog SF.
License¶
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.