GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) Builder
Trip planning technology (the integration of transit route and schedule data on a map) enables riders to determine how they can utilize transit to go between points A and B. How can your agency bring trip planning technology onto your website? It may seem complicated, but you might find the information you already collect moves your agency one step closer to having that technology.
GTFS Builder helps you complete the final steps. National RTAP partnered with the Marcy Jaffe Company (MJC) to bring you GTFS Builder - a free web-based application to help you create GTFS files to post on trip planning websites such as Google Transit. Check out the Why GTFS? Technical Brief and go to the National RTAP Support Center to learn more about how to get started.
Product Features
- Extensive library of short videos that walk you through each step of the process
- Two Excel spreadsheets that help compile your data to create GTFS files
- Instructions on how to use existing data to compile some of the data needed for the Excel files
- Instructions on validating data and getting the files ready to be uploaded
- Set-up for uploading files to Google Transit
- Files are saved to the National RTAP Cloud so that you can update files and have Google Transit fetch files automatically
- Technical assistance and program maintenance to help you and to ensure the application is always up-to-date
GTFS Builder was donated by MJC to help bring innovative technology to small urban, rural and tribal transit providers. While National RTAP promotes using GTFS Builder, there are other GTFS Tools and consultants that can prepare GTFS files and assist you.
The first technical step of GTFS Builder is to determine the location of bus stops, and this is accomplished by finding the latitude and longitude of each stop along a bus route.
Our next step is to input schedule data.
The final step is to validate your data to make sure it works within the trip planner. Once your data has been validated, you set up the file to be launched on Google Transit.