Vollunteer adding Pittsburgh GTFS-R

99 views
Skip to first unread message

Kevin Allen

unread,
Mar 18, 2022, 10:21:27 PM3/18/22
to GTFS-realtime
Hello,
I'm a software engineer who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I would love to add Pittsburgh's bus and light rail system to Google Maps getting real time updates. The city contracted with an app called the Transit App, which is decent, but I think Google Maps would do a lot better, and hopefully increase utilization of the local transit.

I would like to volunteer my time to add this. Our transit system appears to have an existing JSON API https://www.portauthority.org/business-center/developer-resources/, so perhaps it could be as easy as writing some tooing to convert this API too protobuf.

Please let me know how I can help and get started with this.
--
Kevin

Sean Barbeau

unread,
Mar 21, 2022, 2:52:06 PM3/21/22
to GTFS-realtime
Kevin,
Looking at the link, it looks like Clever Devices (the Port Authority's automatic vehicle location vendor) already provides a GTFS Realtime feed (they have it labeled as "General Transit Feed Specification Truetime GTFS-R"):

>GTFS TrueTime feeds from Clever Devices are generally updated within a week before the effective date of our quarterly schedule changes.

>For bus: https://truetime.portauthority.org/gtfsrt-bus/

>For train: https://truetime.portauthority.org/gtfsrt-train/

Have you tried looking at these?

You can find tools to visualize these feeds here:

https://github.com/CUTR-at-USF/awesome-transit#gtfs-realtime-libraries--demo-apps

If the real-time data doesn't show up in Google Maps, it would just be a matter of the Port Authority submitting the correct links to Google. See https://support.google.com/transitpartners/answer/1335046?hl=en&ref_topic=1267790.

Sean

Sean Barbeau

Center for Urban Transportation Research

University of South Florida


ram potham

unread,
Apr 14, 2022, 10:50:15 AM4/14/22
to GTFS-realtime
Hi Kevin,
I was thinking of doing the same thing (publishing PortAuthority data to the google maps feed) and was wondering if you made any progress on this Since there still isn't real time bus tracking. 

I would love to help if you need any!
Best,
Ram Potham

On Friday, March 18, 2022 at 10:21:27 PM UTC-4 kma...@gmail.com wrote:

John Sanborn

unread,
Apr 15, 2022, 10:50:23 AM4/15/22
to gtfs-r...@googlegroups.com
https://www.portauthority.org/business-center/developer-resources/

With a quick look at this link above, it appears that they are already producing GTFS (zip) and GTFS-RT (protobuffer) files for their schedule and real-time, and these files are publicly available. I would suggest contacting them to ask the status of their data on Google Maps.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GTFS-realtime" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to gtfs-realtim...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gtfs-realtime/e166b106-76e7-45ca-8a8d-8168d8317cb8n%40googlegroups.com.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages