GTFS Realtime documentation now available

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Jan 27, 2022, 11:57:42 AM1/27/22

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Official documentation on the MBTA's GTFS Realtime feeds is now available in our GTFS documentation repository. Notably, this includes our JSON-format and "Enhanced JSON" feeds, which previously were not documented. The Enhanced JSON feeds include MBTA-specific fields that are not part of the GTFS-RT standard, similar to the fields documented as "Experimental" in our static feed.

Please note the JSON realtime feeds do not have any versioning mechanism or specific backwards-compatibility guarantees. For most applications we continue to recommend the V3 API, which does have versioning and includes nearly all of the information available in the Enhanced JSON feeds. These feeds would mostly be useful to GTFS consumers who want to incorporate the "enhanced" information using a schema compatible with GTFS Realtime. The non-Enhanced JSON feeds can also be useful for debugging, as they contain the same data as the Protobuf feeds in a human-readable format.

As always, if you have any questions about the documentation or the data, feel free to ask here and we will do our best to answer them!