Introduction

The TransitFeedDistribution contains several parts, each with its own instructions

• TransitFeed - a Python module for reading, writing, and validating feeds
• FeedValidator - a command line tool that checks a Google Transit Feed for problems
• ScheduleViewer - an application for exploring a feed on a map
• KMLWriter - an application for plotting a feed's stops in a KML file for viewing in Google Earth

Download

You may download the transitfeed distribution as Windows executables, a source tar ball or directly from our Subversion repository.

Windows Executable

If you just want to run the tools you may download prebuilt Windows programs from the downloads section. Download the latest version of transitfeed-<version>-windows.zip and unzip the contents into an empty directory. Then see the ScheduleViewer and FeedValidator pages for further instructions.

Install source distribution

Some features of the distribution depend on ElementTree (added to Python's standard library in version 2.5) and pytz. You may need to install these manually.

easy_install transitfeed will download and install transitfeed and the scripts that come with it.

If you don't have easy_install on your computer you may download transitfeed-<version>.tar.gz from the downloads section. Expand with tar -xzf transitfeed-<version>.tar.gz. You may run the tools directly from the expanded directory or run python2.4 setup.py install.

Subversion repository

If you want to make changes grab our source from http://googletransitdatafeed.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/python.

Bugs and feature requests

Please create a new issue if you find bugs or have a feature requests. Patches released under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license are more than welcome! You may contact the developers in the Google Transit Data Feed Google Group.

Revision History

1.2.4 (2009-11-24) +++ STILL STUCK IN TESTING

• Moved transitfeed.py to transitfeed/_transitfeed.py to package it properly with transitfeed/util.py and transitfeed/shapelib.py; provided transitfeed/__init__.py to make the contents of transitfeed available under the same names as before.
• Validation changes
• The W3C formula for luminance comparison of line colors is used (partial fix for issue 108)
• Warn when an input file has more than one column with the same name ( issue 87 )
• Warn when there are several consecutive days without service in the feed validation ( issue 188 )
• Warn when start date or end date are set, but are not valid dates ( issue 41 )
• For problem types that can be sorted by severity keep the N most severe instead of the first N found. These include StopTooFarFromParentStation, StopsTooClose, StationsTooClose, DifferentStationTooClose, StopTooFarFromShapeWithDistTraveled, and TooFastTravel. ( issue 184 )
• It is checked that shape_dist_traveled increases with stop_sequence.
• transitfeed API changes
• Schedule.Validate() is now not run by Loader.Load() by default. To call it implicitly set extra_validation to True, or call it explicitly indicating the service_gap_interval.
• For performance reasons ServicePeriod.IsActiveOn now takes both a date string and, optionally, a date object representing the same date as the string.
• Other changes
• All tools now have a crash handler. The crash dump file is now called transitfeedcrash.txt
• --help available in all tools

1.2.3 (2009-11-05)

• Validation changes
• Warn about duplicate calendar_dates.txt records ( issue 82 , Jiri)
• Ignore warning about travel in 0 seconds for times rounded to nearest minute ( issue 193 )
• transitfeed API changes
• Make transitfeed.Route.AddTripObject private
• Only write agency.txt, stops.txt, routes.txt and trips.txt if they are created
• Other changes
• Fix google_random_queries.py to output URLs with ISO 8601 date formats to avoid locale issues (Richard)
• Fix broken tests in Windows
• Fix kmlparser

1.2.2 (2009-10-16)

• Validation changes
• Warn if a stop is served by a route_type 1 and 3 (Subway and Bus). (Guangfan)
• Warn if vehicles travel too fast between stops (Clancy)
• Output warning or error if a stop is more than 100m or 1km from its parent (Fabien)
• Warn if a schedule starts in the future,  issue 159 
• Warn when a new version of transitfeed has been created (Guangfan)
• Include summary of trips per day in validation-results.html
• parent_station of stop X is not station Y but they are near changed from error to warning ( issue 167 )
• Support HHH:MM:SS for really long distance trips
• New features
• feedvalidator.py --duplicate_trip_check Check for duplicate trips which go through the same stops with same service and start times. (Guangfan)
• feedvalidator.py --limit_per_type=N default is 5. only show the first N warnings or errors of each type. This saves memory when there are many problems. ( issue 37 )
• unusual_trip_filter.py --route_type apply filter only to selected route type. (Jiri)
• feedvalidator.py -o CONSOLE print all errors and warnings to the command console. This lets the validator output useful information before a crash and saves memory when there are many problems.
• location_editor.py adds support for editing station locations to schedule_viewer (Jiri)
• Fix for
•  issue 57 , sort of fixed. Added Schedule(load_stop_times=False) used by google_random_queries.py
•  issue 160 , feedvalidator crash when given bad path
•  issue 153 , merger crash when given wrong number of arguments
•  issue 156 , merge raises error and crashes on input with warning or error
•  issue 177 , Inconsistent line ends error message should say what file had the bad lines
• examples/google_random_queries.py prints errors and warnings to console instead of crashing
• transitfeed.Schedule gets new method GetServicePeriodsActiveEachDate
• The check for stops served by subway and bus and duplicate_trip_check use a second scan of stop_times, which increases validation time by ~10%. They may be disabled by default in a future release.

1.2.1 (2009-05-26)

• Validation changes
• Change unknown 'route_type' value in 'route.txt' from error into warning. (Jiri)
• Change unknown 'location_type' value in 'stops.txt'from error into warning. (Leio)
• Warn if shape_dist_traveled is larger than max shape_dist_traveled of its shape (Leio)
•  issue 114 , issue an Error if a trip has frequencies defined, but no stop_times. (Clancy)
• check that for a stop entrance with location_type=2, its parent_station must have location_type=1. (Leio)
• Stricter checking for route_long_name containing route_short_name. (Leio)
• Some checking that shape and stop location are within 1000m when using shape_dist_traveled (Leio)
• Merger change
• Use a temporary file instead of memory for stops_times. This allows feeds to be merged with less RAM but is slower. If you have small files or lots of RAM the option --memory_db reverts to the previous in-memory storage.
• Fixed  issue 165 , merge when schedules have the same trip_id
• Fix for
•  issue 143 ,  issue 144  Unicode related crashes
•  issue 148 , crash on badly formatted shape_dist_traveled (Clancy)
•  issue 115 , assert stop_id and IndexError crash hit when column isn't found
•  issue 120 , "%s" isn't a recognized time zone; improved error message
• ScheduleViewer tweaks
• Marks patterns with unusual trips (those having non-zero trip_type) with gray background. (Jiri)
• Add support for mouse wheel zooming (Jiri)
• Displays station in red as opposed to stops in blue. (Jiri)
• Add a new option --host to support ditu.google.com maps (Leio)
• New tool unusual_trip_filter.py finds infrequent patterns of routes, setting a GTFS attribute 'trip_type' of the corresponding trips to value '1'. No Windows binary yet.

1.2.0 (2009-02-27)

• GetTimeInterpolatedStops uses polyline connecting stops instead of straight-line between timepoints. (Thanks to William Lachance)
• slightly stricter time format validation. minutes and second must start with 0-5 instead of any digit (Thanks to Clancy Childs)
• add crash handler to merge.py
• protect crash handler from objects that crash when you try to convert them to a string
• Modify shape_importer to parse shapefiles with polylines between stops instead of for entire trips (Thanks to Dennis Lee)
• Support for arbitrary columns in routes.txt, trips.txt
• ScheduleViewer tweaks:
• lat/lng in the station bubble (Thanks to Dennis Lee)
• trip_id search box,  issue 96  (Thanks to Clancy Childs)
• Fix for
•  Issue 67  (and duplicates): bad date format causes feedvalidator crash
• Issue 136 (half of it): zip files written are now compressed
•  Issue 110 : Check that times are in order of sequences in stop_times (Thanks to Clancy Childs)
•  Issue 112 : Warn about unexpected file names in feed (Thanks to Clancy Childs)
•  Issue 119 : Warn about unexpected subdirectories in feed (Thanks to Clancy Childs)
•  Issue 113 : Don't raise a RuntimeError for new location_type (Thanks to Clancy Childs)

v1.1.9 (2008-12-01)

• Fix kmlwriter, which was broken in 1.1.8 (Thanks to PK for the fix)

v1.1.8 (2008-11-25)

• Support for transfers.txt (Thanks to Ivan)
• Make Problem reporter more robust when given a mix of unicode and basic strings
• new command line option for kmlwriter: --date_filter "Restrict to trips active on date YYYYMMDD"
• transitfeed.Trip gets new method ReplaceStopTimeObject
• Fix for
•  Issue 75 : validate stop_latitude and lng are in format -?1-9\d+\.\d+
•  Issue 106 : TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'NoneType' and 'NoneType' in Schedule.Validate
•  Issue 118 : error in transfers.txt file does not appear in validation-results.html document

v1.1.7

• Ignore whitespace before csv fields, warn about whitespace in header fields
• Validate station/stop hierarchy
• Add methods GetHeadwayStopTimes and GetHeadwayStartTimes (Thanks to Juangui)
• Support arbitrary columns in agency.txt and agency_phone
• Fix for
•  Issue 36  : Feed parsing doesn't deal with quoted values correctly when surrounded by space
•  Issue 83  : FeedValidator complains of new feature agency_phone in agency.txt
•  Issue 72  : warning about stops near each other should include distance
•  Issue 92  : Enforce location_type=0 for stops used in stop_times.txt
•  Issue 88  : Validation - location_type, parent_station
•  Issue 101  : feedvalidator rejects blank stop.stop_url

v1.1.6

• Store stop_times table in sqlite. This greatly reduces the memory requirements.
• schedule_viewer no longer requires --key or --feed_filename when connecting to localhost
• added option to kmlwriter to show each shape point
• added new shape parsing library, shapelib.py, but not used by any tools yet
• new methods ServicePeriod.IsActiveOn and ServicePeriod.ActiveDates
• merge stops with station hierarchy (location_type and parent_station)
• fix some bugs

Measured in linux 2.6.22 on an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7300 at 2GHz laptop using feedvalidator.py -p.

v1.1.5

• Add examples/filter_unused_stops.py that loads a gtfs file, modifies some things and saves the changes to a new file
• Fix for
•  Issue 27 : feed validator should check line endings
•  Issue 37 : transitfeed installed as an egg can interfere with tests
•  Issue 54 : AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'strip'
•  Issue 55 : feedvalidator.exe error: TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable (crash handler in py2exe)

v1.1.4

• add merge.py as a script; merge.exe is now part of windows binary distribution
• add examples/google_random_queries.py: outputs a list of random query urls, using stop lat,lng
• add a crash handler to feedvalidator. this provides a friendly message to users and should make it much easier for us to debug problems
• unicode names in a feed could make merge.py crash
• new method Stop.GetTrips
• fix for some things that could make feedvalidator crash, including  issue 40 

v1.1.3

• added a new tool, merge.py that merges two feed files
• fix for  issue 46 , "Color contrast issue in FeedValidator should be a warning, not an error."
• FeedValidator outputs a warning for unknown columns
• KMLWriter optionally draws trips with altitude for time
• small changes to validator html output. fix some html, add internal link to warnings
• recognize the stop_code field

v1.1.2

• Changed #! from python2.4 to python2.5
• Check for rows missing cells. Contributed by Clancy
• fixed typo in FareRule
• kmlwriter much enhanced by Timothy. For each route output the shapes, patterns of stops and optionally a line for each trip

v1.1.1

• Schedule Viewer changes:
• More accurate display of route names
• Better support for unicode IDs
• Stop time interpolation
• FeedValidator changes:
• FeedValidator now categorizes issues as either errors or warnings
• Checks for missing start & end times on trips
• Warning if the feed has expired or will in the next month
• Better handling of UTF-8/16 and other file encoding issues
• Allows more lenient sequence numbers now that the spec allows them
• Added warning for poor route color contrast

v1.1.0

• Schedule Viewer now displays shapes when available.
• FeedValidator now shows feed metadata at the top of its output and highlights the relevant column for problems.
• Added --output switch to set HTML output path and made -n switch disable loading of output in browser in FeedValidator.
• Validation changes:
• Duplicate schedule_id validation now works
• Error on stops that don't pick up, drop off, or act as a timepoint
• Error when day in service period isn't set to "1" or "0"
• More thorough checking of date values
• Error when a stop time departs before it arrives
• Error when a stop time specifies either arrival or departure time, but not both

v1.0.9

• FeedValidator now provides nicer HTML output in a browser instead of hard-to-read text.
• Added a directory of example Python scripts using transitfeed.
• kmlparser converts KML lines into GTFS shape.

v1.0.8

Move schedule_viewer data files and marey_graph into package gtfsscheduleviewer so that setup.py installs them in a sensible place. Add a hack so py2exe schedule_viewer can find its data files. schedule_viewer --key option will get key from a file if it exists.

v1.0.7

Adds kmlparser and kmlwriter utilities for partially converting feeds from and to Google Earth KML format. Also includes several validation improvements, particularly to stop times and route_short_name.

v1.0b6

Adds a Windows executable for schedule_viewer.

v1.0b5

Adds more validation of service_ids.

v1.0b4

Further improves line wrapping, improves ID display, limits the number of unused stops shown.

v1.0b3

Adds better line wrapping to make the output more pleasant to read.

v1.0b2

Adds testing to identify stops that probably refer to the same location because they're close enough together.

v1.0b1

First standalone Windows version.