GTFS Open Transport Data Format

Hat tip and thanks to Chris Osborne and his team from ITO, who have converted a lot of the TransXChange and NaPTAN data that we have for the Transport Hack Day into the GTFS open format. He’s also put together some pointers below for collaborators to quickly get up to speed and sink their teeth into the datasets.

The datasets are available in the project Dropbox – access to that is by invitation to folks who have signed up for the Hack Day, so please do and then have a scan of the other datasets too.

GTFS is an easy to use open standard for use of transport schedule data. It is broken down into *.txt files, including all the bus/train/tram stops with lat/long geotags which is really useful as all the other datasets are in OS format which needs translating. It also contains a routes.txt file with descriptions of all available bus/tram routes.

Examples of what has already been built with GTFS datasets can be found here:
http://www.citygoround.org/

Graphserver is an open-source multi-modal trip planner, with that and the GTFS you can get a routing API up and running without too much effort. Though be aware that the documentation is lagging behind the commits:
http://graphserver.github.com/graphserver/.

OpenTripPlanner is an open-source trip planner with a nice map interface that you can deploy using the GTFS file. To crunch a routing graph for an area this size you are going to need a good amount of RAM (>4GB). AWS is probably your friend here.
http://opentripplanner.org/

There is a useful collection of GTFS libraries or tools here:
http://wiki.transiki.org/GTFS_Tools