GTFS Realtime

Assessment

• Open License Yes

• Transferable to Other Jurisdictions Yes

  If a transit agency has the technology (Bus tracking by GPS) GTFS Realtime is transferable, with only several required variables.

• Stakeholder Participation Yes

  It was developed by Google, a software developer, in partnership with transit agencies and developers

• Consensus-Based Governance Yes

  Contributions can be made to the GTFS Realtime project on the GitHub page, but all contributions are subject to a strict voting and discussion protocol, and contributors must sign a license agreement

• Extensions Yes

  Third-party developers can define additional fields for GTFS Realtime but must contact the GTFS Realtime discussion Google group to be assigned an extension id so that they can use a unique protocol buffer

• Human Readable Yes

  Many agencies have APIs in addition to protocol buffers that have responses in XML, JSON, and JSONP formats

• Machine Readable Yes

  The data is hosted over HTTP and consists of protocol buffers. Google's protocol buffers are used for data serialization and work as an alternative to XML. The data structure is stored in a gtfs realtime.proto file. The file produces source code to read and write the structured data and then retrieves it to and from a data stream using a variety of programming languages. Unique IDs such as VehicleID and StopID are compatible with static GTFS values

• Requires Up-To-Date / Real-Time Data Yes

  Every protocol buffer has an [optional] timestamp in the header indicating when the content of the feed was created.

• Metadata Yes

  Protocol Buffer structure