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What source of information is industry standard for transit web application - GTFS vs Trapeze data files

We are looking into exiting web application which is consuming GTFS data files and there are few issues related to route-branches/patterns so we are re-thinking about using alternate data source like Trapeze (TSDE). I do not know what other transit companies are using for their web application so what is the industry standard data source to make transit web application to give information.

During the analysis we found multiple data sources available for consumption 1-GTFS or 2-Trapeze data format (TSDE)

I found that transportation industry communicate / shares data in GTFS format but Trapeze data(TSDE) has more data than GTFS.

Solution

  • For typical customer-facing applications, I would generally recommend GTFS.

    GTFS is an open-source interchange format for transit schedule data which is widely used for customer-facing applications, but not for other use cases. The format was originally designed by Google, working with TriMet in Portland, and Google generally requires that transit agencies provide data in this format to make their schedule information available on Google Maps.

    Trapeze is an IT company that provides a wide variety of products to transit agencies, such as route scheduling, workforce planning, and realtime system monitoring and control. They have a proprietary data format for schedule information, which is mostly used internally at transit agencies, but is also sometimes used as a format for sharing data externally. For transit agencies that use Trapeze for scheduling, schedule data is easy to export in this format.

    I would recommend GTFS for customer-facing applications: the specification is public, open-source, easy to use and understand, and the data is easy to find online for many transit agencies, especially in the US. Schedule information in Trapeze format is not generally available to the public, and it does not have a public API definition (or not one I can easily find, anyway). Perhaps you have specific data needs that cannot be accommodated by the GTFS spec, in which case it may be easier to use the Trapeze format, or alternatively you may choose to add your own custom extension to GTFS.