Software:Transitland

Short description: Open transit data platform

Transitland is an open data software platform aggregating public transit and micromobility data from around the world for use by software developers, transportation planners, data analysts, and hobbyists. It primarily uses the GTFS data specification.

History

Transitland was started as part of Mapzen and publicly released in 2015.

According to Wired in 2016, "Transitland collects and standardizes public data sets for developers. After launching a year ago with data from New York and San Francisco, the service, offered by mapping platform Mapzen, expanded to more than 200 regions this week."

Also in 2016, the popular open data website GTFS Data Exchange announced its shutdown and recommended that users, transit agencies, and developers switch to using Transitland. According to GTFS Data Exchange at the time, Transitland "has steadily been growing as a reference spot for worldwide GTFS data, and the spot for transit agencies to connect with developers. It is also built to expose schedule data from a single consistent database which makes it even easier for developers to access schedule information."

In 2016, Trillium Transit, a firm that "make[s] and maintain[s] GTFS data for about 200 transit agencies across the US" wrote that "Transitland is likely to become a critical part of the open-source stack in tomorrow’s transit applications."

In 2017, Planetizen awarded Transitland as one of the top planning websites of the year, writing that "Transitland is like a theme park for transit data nerds.".

In 2018, when Mapzen shut down, Transitland was continued by Mapzen alums. In 2019, Transitland version 2 was announced. Transitland is currently operated by Interline Technologies.

Feed Sources

Transitland ingests source feeds from public-transit agencies in the GTFS and GTFS Realtime formats.

Transitland aggregates source feeds from transit operators in 75 countries.

Transitland also ingests source feeds from bikeshare and micromobility systems in the GBFS format.

Transitland's directory of feeds is maintained in the Transitland Atlas, a public repository on GitHub. The records in Transitland Atlas are in JSON files. For many transit operators, the matching Wikidata record identifier is also stored for cross-referencing purposes. Transitland Atlas is also used by other open-source projects, including the Transitous FOSS project.

Functionality

Website

Transitland provides a website for browsing source feeds, operators, stops, and routes. The website also features a webmap of all transit routes and stops available in the platform using vector tiles created by Transitland APIs.

APIs

Transitland also provides APIs to developers. From 2015 to 2023, the v1 REST API was provided to developers based on the Transitland Datastore, a Ruby on Rails web application. From 2019 to the present, the v2 APIs are provided to developers in REST, GraphQL, and MVT formats.

Onestop ID scheme

Identifiers called Onestop IDs are used within the Transitland platform to provide unique IDs for feeds, operators, stops, and routes. For example, o-dr5r-nyct is the Onestop ID for the MTA New York City Transit operator.[1]https://www.transit.land/operators/o-dr5r-nyct

The Wikidata project also makes use of Onestop IDs. Onestop IDs are defined as Wikidata external identifier property. Contributors to Wikidata have tagged many transit operators, stops, and routes with their matching Onestop IDs to enable cross-referencing of records between Transitland and Wikidata.

References

Category:Open data