[Talk-transit] Google Transit Feed

[McGuire, Matthew]

Hi all,

Question:
Is there a standard routine that will regularly import transit stops from a GTFS source?

There was a discussion about whether transit stops belong in OpenStreetMap. I think the consensus was that they do, but there might be update problems. Many transit agencies in the US give their schedule information, including stops, to Google on a regular basis in the "Google Transit Feed Specification" GTFS (here is the stops schema - http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html#stops_txt___Field_Definitions), mine included.

At least at our agency, Transit stops change on a weekly basis, it seems unreasonable that community mapping could keep that up to date. The transit agency is doing the work of keeping it up (hopefully!), and it would be trivial (for an OSM import/update wiz) to bring GTFS data into OSM. Maybe this is already being done.

If there isn't a standard routine and someone cares to try and make one, transit data (including stops) in both GTFS and Shapefile format for Metro Transit (the public transit agency for the Minneapolis/St. Paul region of the US - http://www.metrotransit.org) is always here:
http://www.datafinder.org/catalog/index.asp#Transportation
http://www.datafinder.org/metadata/transit_schedule_google_feed.htm
http://www.datafinder.org/metadata/bus_stops_p.htm

Matt



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