Since 2012, EACOMM Corporation has been working on modeling public mass transit systems using the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a standard format for public transit schedules and geographical information. It was developed by Google and Portland TriMet for the public transportation system of Portland, USA and was launched on December 7, 2005. It consists of multiple CSV (comma-separated values) files contained in a single zip file. Key information encoded in GTFS includes: transit agency information, route information, trip schedules, stop locations, route shapes, etc. GTFS has quickly been adopted as the most accepted standard in formatting transit information in a way that can be easily shared across multiple applications. Popular applications such as Open Trip Planner, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Trafi and other Mobile Transit Apps all use GTFS to offer trip planning services to their users. EACOMM Corporation has developed GTFS models of the Philippines, Singapore, as well as specific routes in Malaysia and Indonesia.
GTFS Realtime
GTFS Realtime is an extension of the General Transit Feed Specification(GTFS) that gives public transportation agencies the capability to provide real time updates about their fleet. Information such as expected time of arrival, trip delays/cancellations, service alerts/notifications, and vehicle location can be provided using GTFS real time. GTFS realtime makes use of Protocol Buffers, a language-neutral, platform-neutral, mechanism to serialize structured data in a much smaller file size – making its transmission faster and more efficient. GTFS-RT as a standard is not yet as widely adopted as static GTFS, with a number of transit agencies offering their own format in sharing real time data as well as ‘rival’ formats such as Service Interface for Real Time Information (SIRI) available. GTFS RT also presents much more complex challenges than providing static GTFS as the element of ‘speed’ comes into play and management of server resources, latency, and software efficiency is critical. EACOMM has worked on GTFS RT feeds for the Philippines, Singapore, and Jakarta.
EACOMM offers consultancy and training on both GTFS Static and GTFS Realtime. For more information on EACOMM Corporation’s efforts on developing and deploying GTFS and GTFS Realtime feeds contact solutions@eacomm.com.