Frequently Asked Questions

GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) is a standardized format for public transportation schedules and geographic information. It allows transit agencies to publish their data in a format that can be consumed by a wide variety of applications.

GTFS Schedule provides information about routes, schedules, fares, and geographic transit details among many other features, and it is presented in simple text files. These files are updated semi-regularly, depending on the agency. Most agencies will update their GTFS Schedule feed whenever they update their route schedules.

GTFS Realtime provides real-time updates about vehicle positions, trip updates, and service alerts. This data is updated continuously throughout the day. These files are presented in the form of Protocol Buffers and are meant to be machine-readable.

GTFS data can be used to:

• Build trip planning applications
• Create real-time vehicle tracking displays
• Analyze transit service patterns and performance
• Integrate transit information into mapping applications
• Research transportation accessibility and equity

This dashboard is rebuilt periodically to fetch the latest feed information from the MobilityData Mobility Database. The "Last updated" timestamp in the footer shows when the data was last refreshed.

Per MobilityData: The Mobility Database fetches and stores new datasets once a day at midnight UTC.

• Operational: All feeds are active and available
• Minor Issues: Some feeds may be marked as "development" or have a mixed status
• Major Issues: One or more feeds are marked as "inactive" (and don't have an active version) or "deprecated" (and don't have a replacement)
• Unknown: No feed information is available for this agency

Some feeds require an API key or other authentication to access. This is typically free but requires registration with the transit agency. Click the "Details" link next to the authentication notice to learn how to obtain access.

MobilityData hosted feeds are archived snapshots that are downloaded and stored by the MobilityData organization. They're reliable and don't require authentication. These feeds are all run through the canonical GTFS validator to determine if they meet the specification.

Direct downloads come straight from the transit agency and are typically more up-to-date, but may require authentication and have not been directly validated.

For most applications, MobilityData hosted feeds are perfectly fine. Use direct feeds if you need the absolute latest data.

This dashboard includes transit agencies in the following regions:

• Metro Vancouver
• Central Fraser Valley, Chilliwack, Agassiz, Harrison, and Hope
• Victoria and surroundings
• Whistler
• Squamish
• Kelowna
• South Okanagan-Similkameen
• Kamloops and Clearwater

As transit in BC is usually operated by only one entity per region - that being BC Transit everywhere except Metro Vancouver (where it's TransLink), this list largely consists of the various BC Transit operating regions.

All feed information is sourced from the Mobility Database, a comprehensive catalog of open mobility data maintained by MobilityData.

Errors are critical issues that prevent the feed from working correctly in applications. These should be fixed by the transit agency.

Warnings are best practice violations that won't break applications but may cause suboptimal behavior.

A small number of warnings is normal. Multiple errors usually indicates an issue with the way the feed was generated.

Most GTFS feeds are published under open licenses that allow commercial use, but you should check the specific license for each feed. License information is displayed in the feed details when available.

• GTFS.org - Official specification and documentation
• MobilityData - The organization that manages the GTFS standard and the Mobility Database
• Mobility Database - Global database of transit and mobility feeds - the source for this dashboard
• awesome-transit - Community list of transit APIs, apps, datasets, research, and software
• GTFS Validator - Tool for validating GTFS feeds

Absolutely! The source code for this dashboard will soon be available on GitHub and will be made available under the GNU GPLv3 license.