A General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Realtime feed allows you to provide current information about your transit service to application developers, including Google. GTFS-Realtime is designed for easy implementation and compatibility with the route and schedule information in your GTFS feed. Because of this, it can provide the most accurate and useful passenger information possible.
How to check your eligibility?
For Google to provide live updates on your transit fleet, you first need to make a working GTFS static feed available through Google Maps. Learn more about GTFS modeling with Google Transit.
- If your static transit information is already available in Google Maps, fill out the contact form so that we can check your eligibility to share your Realtime feed.
- If you haven’t already provided your static transit information, follow these instructions to participate.
Launching Trip Updates and Vehicle Positions feeds simultaneously:
If you have both Trip Updates and Vehicle Positions feeds, the recommendation is to first publish the Vehicle positions feed as it can also be used to show estimates based on traffic conditions and distance of the vehicle from stop.
In case you wish to publish both the feeds simultaneously, there are two possible scenarios listed below:
- Vehicle Positions feed to show estimates and location of the vehicle; Trip Updates feed to show cancellations
- Vehicle Positions feed to show only the location of the vehicle; Trip updates feed to show estimates and cancellations