National Transportation Center
Deriving Transit Performance Metrics from GTFS Data
Project Abstract
Transit agencies devote extensive resources to producing General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Schedule and Realtime data to power trip planning applications. In representing scheduled and actual service characteristics, these data offer a theoretical off-label use to generate metrics of transit service performance. This project seeks to create and test a set of standardized protocols for deriving and visualizing these performance metrics from raw GTFS feeds. These protocols would be established in such a way as to enable transit agencies, planningorganizations, transportation researchers, transit advocates, and community-based organizations to easily implement them on any transit system with available GTFS schedule and GTFS realtime feeds. Specific metrics would look at common transit issues tied to schedule deviation - from on-time performance to bus bunching – but at a more granular spatial and temporal levelthan ever before possible. This detail, literally at the stop and segment level, is designed to enable more effective and equitable transit planning and advocacy.
The research would first collect a multi-day sample of GTFS schedule and realtime data fromone or more transit agencies. This information would serve as the core data for the entireproject. These data would be stored in a relational database that enables spatial analysis, such as PostGIS. The research would first design appropriate cleaning and aggregating protocols toprepare the data for performance analysis. A web-based tool, likely using D3, would bedesigned to allow a user to interact with the data to generate and visualize the transit performance metrics. The tool would allow fine-grained filtering by location and time period to enable detailed analysis of transit performance. A key feature of this approach is to allow interactivity with the data.
Universities Involved
Morgan State University
Principle Investigators
Gregory Newmark
Funding Sources and Amounts
USDOT: $100,000
Start Date
September 1, 2023
Completion Date
September 1, 2024
Expected Research Outcomes & Impacts
Once a working protocol is developed, it would be field tested with community partners from transit agencies to community organizations. The goal of that testing would be to refine theprotocols to prepare them for wide dissemination. Once the field testing and refinement is complete, a larger process of sharing the protocols would be undertaken through webinars, such as the Transit Data Webinar series, and presentations at relevant conferences, such as the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, the Research-to-Practice Transit Symposium.The final product would include the source code as well as directions on its implementation.
Subject Areas
GTFS, public transit, big data
Contact Information
Morgan State University
1700 E. Cold Spring Lane
Center for Built Environment and Infrastructure Studies 327
Baltimore, MD 21251
P: 443-885-3666
F: 443-885-8275
Contact Information
Morgan State University
1700 E. Cold Spring Lane
Center for Built Environment and Infrastructure Studies 327
Baltimore, MD 21251
P: 443-885-3666
F: 443-885-8275