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GTFS

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines an open standard format for exchanging public transportation schedule, geographic and fare information.

Table of contents

• Quick overview
• Introduction
• Additional documentation
• Tools
• Additional resources

Quick overview

• Purpose: Exchanging public transportation schedule, geographic and fare information.
• Data type: vector
• Type of format: Transit schedule format
• Multi-file format: Yes (ZIP)
• File type: binary
• File extension(s): .zip (agency.txt, routes.txt, trips.txt, stop_times.txt, stops.txt, calendar.txt)
• Originally developed by: started out as a side project of Google employee Chris Harrelson (2006)
• Technical description/specification: General Transit Feed Specification Reference
• License: CC BY 3.0
• Regulated by: Google
• Status: de facto standard
• Sample file(s): gtfs.org/examples/
• Consumable by:
  • ArcMap
  • ArcGIS Pro
  • GeoEvent
  • ...

Introduction

It is a file format extended from CSV (vector data types) as a format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. It has become a de facto standard.

Additional documentation

• Cool tools for analysis with public transit data
• How to make a shapes.txt file for your GTFS dataset with ArcGIS

Tools

• Display GTFS transit stops and lines (route shapes) in ArcMap or ArcGIS Pro
• public-transit-tools: python tools for working with GTFS public transit data in ArcGIS
• gtfsrealtime-for-geoevent: ArcGIS GeoEvent Server sample connector for GTFS (Google Transit Feed Specification) real-time feed.

Additional resources

Probably not all the resources are in this list, please use the ArcGIS Search tool looking for: "GTFS".