Transit open data is increasingly being shared by transit agencies. General transit feed specification (GTFS) static and real time data for South East Queensland is available through Translink.

We have developed a systematic framework to extract and store GTFS data . The details for which are documented in:

A Lim, S Sharma,A Bhaskar and S Arkatkar. An open source framework for GTFS data analytics: case study using the Brisbane TransLink network, 2019 Australasian Transport Research Forum

The source code for the framework with Translink's GTFS live feed is available at: https://github.com/darronlim/GTFS_LiveFeed_Extraction

General transit feed specification visualization

GTFS real time data includes simple text files as live feeds on vehicle positions, trip updates, and service alerts. Translink real time feeds are at the frequency of 2-10 seconds, the download for which is around 25 GB of data per day.

To give life to this big data in text format, we are developing number of visualization tools. Few examples are presented below. Note: The images are hyperlinked to the respective tool.

Transit vehicle position visualization (VP)

Here, transit vehicle positions (from GTFS real time) are linked to the respective route (from GTFS static) and visualized to provide an overview of the vehicle movement and the spatial temporal extend of the data available. For simplicity of the presentation, only high frequency buses are currently linked to the back end.

Transit individual vehicle speed on the link visualization (VS)

Here, the transit vehicle trajectories from VP tool is integrated with the geographical location of the transit stops and pre-determined links. These links are consistent with the our road congestion visualization using Bluetooth data. For each link the space mean speed of the vehicle in 15 min time bin are extracted. This interactive tool when clicked on a link provides time series of the individual transit vehicle space mean speed on the link. User has the flexibility to select the route, and the direction (0 for inbound and 1 for outbound). For simplicity of the presentation, only high frequency buses are currently linked in the back end .

Transit congestion map (CM)

The above VS tool is further extended, to estimate the time series of the space mean speed for the link based on the different transit vehicles traversing over the link. This provides opportunities to visualize the congestion on the transit network.