Creating the National Transit Map How we are Leveraging Standards and Open Data for a New National Geospatial AssetKeynote Speaker: Derald Dudley, Geographer, US Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Washington, DC
A perfect wrap-up for the GIS in Transit Conference!
The creation of the GTFS data standard and technological advances, that now allow local transit agencies to electronically publish this detailed information on bus and rail routes, stops and time tables in a machine readable format, provided a new opportunity for USDOT.
The National Transit Map takes advantage of this by leveraging data that transit agencies already make available to the public and combining this voluntarily provided GTFS data into one data set.
Transit agencies that are already providing this information as open data are able to participate with little effort by registering their data and granting the USDOT a Creative Commons license to access and use the agency's transit data periodically. The result puts accurate data about the nation transportation system, such as the location of transit stops, frequency of transit service, and transit routes into the hands of stakeholders. This project will also help educate transit agencies who do not currently use GTFS about its benefits to researchers, private software developers, and the riding public.
