The Definitive Guide to GTFS-realtime

How to consume and produce real-time public transportation data with the GTFS-rt specification.

Originally written by Quentin Zervaas.

About This Book

This book is a comprehensive guide to GTFS-realtime, a specification for publishing of real-time public transportation data. GTFS-realtime is designed to complement the scheduled data that hundreds of transit agencies around the world publish using GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification).

This book begins with a description of the specification, with discussion about the three types of data contained in GTFS-realtime feeds: service alerts; vehicle positions; and trip updates.

Next the reader is introduced to Protocol Buffers, the data format that GTFS-realtime uses when it is being transmitted. This section then instructs the reader how to consume the three types of data from GTFS-realtime feeds (both from standard feeds and feeds with extensions).

Finally, the reader is shown how to produce a GTFS-realtime feed. A number of examples in this book use Java, but the lessons can be applied to a number of different languages.

This book complements The Definitive Guide to GTFS.

About The Author

Quentin was the founder of TransitFeeds (now <OpenMobilityData.org>), a web site that provides a comprehensive listing of public transportation data available around the world. This site is referenced various times throughout this book.

Credits

First Edition. Published in August 2015.

Technical Reviewer

Nick Maher

Copy Editors

Anne Zervaas Miranda Little

Disclaimer

The information in this book is distributed on an "as is" basis, without warranty. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, the author shall not be liable to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

Note

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, and was published at https://github.com/MobilityData/GTFS-books.