GTFS Realtime Tutorial #5: Additional Resources

The following tutorial was created by Brian Ferris:

In my fifth and final tutorial on GTFS-realtime, I want to wrap up by pointing to a number of additional resources that I've put together that you might find useful when working with GTFS-realtime.

In the first two tutorials in the series, I discussed ways you can programmatically produce a GTFS-realtime feed. However, I hope agencies won't all have to write GTFS-realtime adapters from scratch for their AVL systems. Instead, I hope that eventually AVL systems will support GTFS-realtime natively, much in the way that many scheduling systems now support GTFS. That level of support will take some time, so in the interim, we in the community can provide a number of off-the-shelf adapters for common real-time systems that can be used right now.

To that end, I've written a few adapters of my own. The first is an adapter for the SIRI real-time format (http://siri.org.uk/), an real-time operations standard used primarily in Europe but increasingly in the US. I've written an adapter that can consume SIRI Vehicle Monitoring and Situation Exchange data-streams to produce GTFS-realtime feeds:

https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-gtfs-realtime-from-siri-cli/wiki

This adapter is a good place to start if you have an AVL system that produces SIRI data and you are interested in providing a GTFS-realtime feed.

In addition to SIRI, I've also written a GTFS-realtime adapter for the NextBus API service:

https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-gtfs-realtime-from-nextbus-cli/wiki

The adapter can produce a GTFS-realtime trip updates feed for a NextBus agency and it can even automatically help match the ids used by NextBus to the ids used in an agency's GTFS feed, since the two systems don't always agree.

Beyond adapters, I've also written a few plugins for Nagios and Munin to assist with monitoring a GTFS-realtime feed. You can see the Munin plugin in action in the picture associated with this post. To check out these resources and more, head over to the OneBusAway GTFS-realtime Resources page:

https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway/wiki/GTFS-Realtime-Resources

I hope that you've found these tutorials on GTFS-realtime useful. Real-time transit data is pretty exciting stuff ; ) and I want to help make it accessible to both agencies and developers. Thanks!