TransXChange & Google Transit

Google Transit Feed Specification and TransXChange

Related EU Standards

Google Transit Feed Specification is a proprietary format used to input data to the Google Transit engines for simple journey planning.

An open source project, the Google transit data feed , aims to provide converters from popular timetable data formats.

These include converters from TransXChange 2.1

Comparison of Google Transit & TransXChange/Transmodel

Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a proprietary format for exchanging basic timetable data using a comma separated variable (csv) format encoding. A timetable is broken down into a series of flat files.

GTFS uses a representation of a timetable as a set of cvs files. GTFS has a simple implicit model of a timetable that lacks some of the distinctions and additional intermediate abstractions that have been found to be valuable in creating reusable models and datasets in for a wide variety of PT applications in Europe and have led to the development of TransModel.

However the underlying GTFS concepts can be mapped to a subset of the Transmodel based PT model used in TransXChange, as discussed in this short review paper, which states the equivalences (and some of the limitations) of the current GTFS format. It is then straightforward to extract data from a TXC document into GTFS format.

The following is a reverse engineered diagram of the implicit model used in GTFS as of June 2007, annotated with the corresponding TransModel terms.

GTFS model compared with TransModel (June 2007) Click to enlarge