A Landmark Achievement in Transit Data
In a historic moment for the transit data world, GTFS-Flex—the extension that enables discovery of demand-responsive services in trip planning applications—was officially adopted into GTFS. The overwhelming support shown through the vote (a record number of participants!) reflects the value stakeholders across the industry place on this empowering technology.
The Journey to Adoption
TransitApp interface on demand-responsive services ensures accessible information on transit operations
The successful vote is the culmination of over eleven years of collaborative work across many companies, nonprofits, transit agencies, and government agencies. Trillium, an Optibus company, is proud to have had a hand in this monumental effort since the beginning through specification design, data creation for hundreds of demand-responsive services, and by helping inform wider audiences on Flex's capabilities.
Microtransit services offer convenient pickup and drop-off options for all types of riders, including priority groups
We are confident that both our past and present efforts bring us closer to our vision of any rider being able to easily discover any transit service, including on-demand, route deviation, “Dial-a-Ride,” and more.
The Value of Experience
RideNoCo Trip Discovery Tool provides valuable information on how to use demand-responsive transit to get around Northern Colorado
Those familiar with contributing to an open data standard know that adding a GTFS extension as groundbreaking as Flex into the fold through a successful vote is no small feat. Fortunately, Trillium was well-positioned to enable the community to overcome challenges involved in formalizing new data standards. Thanks to the many lessons we’ve learned from our hands-on experience as leading producers of GTFS-Flex data, we were able to serve as resident Flex experts (Flexperts?) for multiple working groups and assist in documenting best practices and implementation guidance.
The Power of Collaboration
ConnectingVA trip planning tool, powered by GTFS
For us, though, such victories in standards adoption are predicated on cooperation among a multidisciplinary coalition of participants. Shaping Flex from an idea into the specification it is today took us and our partners years establishing sponsorship for the work, collecting use cases, designing, testing, redesigning... We encountered many technical challenges together, some of which required laying aside our previously held assumptions to put good spec design first. The result? A stronger, more resilient framework for modeling demand-responsive transit within GTFS-based systems. The 17 other organizations who voted in favor of Flex’s adoption seem to agree.
Acknowledgments and Future Steps
We thank our colleagues at MobilityData for their instrumental stewardship of Flex and all other GTFS extension efforts, and we thank all our partners for their continued collaboration in expanding GTFS’s capabilities.
Get Involved
If you are an agency interested in having your demand-responsive services modeled with GTFS-Flex so they can be represented in trip planning applications, please contact us here.
