Transit Data Blog

Simple, fabulous work by Richard Cook, now in a simple webpage.

This week’s Talking Headways podcast is a panel from the National Shared Mobility Summit on the hot transport topic of the day– autonomous vehicles. Most conference panels I’ve seen are populated with people who are surely intelligent and great at their jobs, but haven’t honed their ideas down to fit the format. This one is different and well worth a listen.

Pay attention to Finland– I hope to write more on what they are doing soon.

Mobility is Like a Heavy Metal Band

Economist Tim Harford has a wonderfully compact review of The Tyranny of Metrics. The review is well worth a read, or as Harford points out:

If you want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of The Tyranny of Metrics you will need to read it — or trust the opinion of someone who has.

18F, the US Government’s digital renegades, posted a blog post strongly arguing that government agencies don’t need to develop apps. Hint: the web is much better at getting something out the door.

511.org in the (California) Bay Area provides GTFS and GTFS-Realtime for many of the agencies in the region, including VTA, Caltrain, SF Muni, AC Transit, and a whole lot more.

The docs are available here, but I find the PDF a little dense (and there are some peculiarities), so this is a cheat sheet.

First you need a token sent to your email address.

Continue reading “A cheat sheet for Bay Area 511 GTFS-rt feeds.”

Aaron Antrim has a long and detailed piece about the history of GTFS (and some on other standards that do not see public use). It is well worth a read.

Sean Barbeau has a great post on the shortcomings of GTFS-rt 1.0 and how they have been improved in the recently ratified version 2.0. It is here and well worth the read.

Mapzen has recently released Transitflow, a set of tools for visualizing transit vehicles via their scheduled locations. See below the fold to watch the magic dots.

Continue reading “Transitflow — Couldn’t have done it better”

You know that annoying problem when three buses arrive at once? It’s really hard to solve.

GTFS-Realtime is a an efficient means for interchange of large amounts of data on the state of a public transport network. The combination of its efficiency and implementation result in a product that is difficult to understand for newcomers. This is made even worse by the fact that the documentation is intermixed with code.

This repository presents the same information (along with several extensions) as hypertext, which may be easier to understand. See that documentation here.