GTFS FEEDS
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Ride New Orleans maintains current and historical GTFS data for the Greater New Orleans transit system, including service by the Regional Transit Authority serving Orleans Parish and JP Transit serving Jefferson Parish. These feeds provide detailed information on routes, schedules, and service levels for the public transit network.
The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is an Open Standard used to distribute relevant information about transit systems to riders. It allows public transit agencies to publish their transit data in a format that can be consumed by a wide variety of software applications. GTFS was originally developed by Google (as the Google Transit Feed Specification) to compile transit schedule and service data to display in Google Maps. It has since evolved into an open specification “developed and maintained by the community of transit agencies, developers, and other stakeholders who use GTFS.” (GTFS specification process).
The GTFS standard covers two data formats: the “GTFS schedule” format (often referred to as “GTFS static” or simply GTFS), which provides information on routes, stops, and schedules; and the “GTFS realtime” format, which provides active, live-updating trip information including locations for transit vehicles. The feeds provided below are for GTFS (static) schedule data.
RIDE maintains an archive of historical RTA and JP Transit GTFS static feeds service for developing our Access to Jobs metrics and comparative analysis of Greater New Orleans transit service over time. The RTA has maintained a GTFS feed since 2012 and JP Transit has maintained a GTFS feed since 2016.
RTA GTFS. As of 2023, the static RTA GTFS feed is hosted online and can be downloaded at norta.com/RTA/media/GTFS/GTFS.zip. Historically, RIDE periodically requested feeds from RTA staff to develop our State of Transit report and for other analysis. RIDE also obtained historic feeds from other public sources including the Open Mobility Data TransitFeeds hub. The RTA maintains a GTFS realtime feed which powers live bus and streetcar tracking in the Le Pass App. Developers can obtain this feed via a licensing agreement which is available through the RTA open data page.
JP Transit GTFS. As of 2024, the static JP Transit feed is not yet hosted online. RIDE periodically requests feeds from JP Transit staff to develop our State of Transit report and for other analysis. JP transit maintains a GTFS realtime feed for its live bus tracking app and the RTA Le Pass app. Contact JP Transit for more information on the Jefferson Parish GTFS realtime feed.
Beginning in 2024, the FTA will start phasing in a new rule for most U.S. transit agencies to maintain a GTFS schedule feed for National Transit Database (NTD) reporting purposes: “FTA will now collect GTFS data for all agencies offering fixed routes, which was previously voluntary, to facilitate the transfer of transit service data for mobile applications. Agencies must now maintain at least one web link for GTFS data in report year (RY) 2023, and applicable reporters must certify their web links are updated annually starting in RY 2024.” (National Transit Database: Reporting Changes and Clarifications, 2023).
Annual NTD data for a given reporting year is submitted in the spring of the following year, so RY2023 and RY2024 data will be submitted Spring 2024 and 2025, respectively. RIDE plans to add RTA and JP transit data from NTD to this portal as that data becomes available during the 2024-2025 reporting periods.
