[MTA] Upcoming change to stop sequence indexing in MTA real-time bus feeds (May 7)

[Shen-Cruz, Dillon]

Hi MTA developer community,

Starting on Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 10:00 PM Eastern Time, the MTA will make a minor but potentially breaking change to our GTFS-Realtime (GTFS-RT) bus feeds.

We are updating our stop sequence indexing to start at 1 instead of 0 for real-time bus updates; this primarily affects the stop_sequence field in the StopTimeUpdate message of our TripUpdates feed. This change brings our GTFS-RT feed into closer alignment with our static GTFS feed, where stop_sequence already starts at 1 in stop_times.txt. 

While this is a small update, it may cause issues in third-party applications that assume 0-based indexing. We recommend reviewing your applications to ensure compatibility. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Dillon

Dillon Shen-Cruz (he/him) 

Metropolitan Transportation Authority 

Product Manager, Data and APIs

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