GTFS-Realtime Export API

OneBusAway provides an API for exporting data in the GTFS-realtime format. It supports all three major GTFS-realtime datatypes:

  • alerts
  • trip updates
  • vehicle positions

Specifically, we support methods for retrieving GTFS-realtime feeds on a per agency basis. The API URLs take the following form:

  • http://localhost:8080/api/gtfs_realtime/alerts-for-agency/1.pb?key=TEST
  • http://localhost:8080/api/gtfs_realtime/trip-updates-for-agency/1.pb?key=TEST
  • http://localhost:8080/api/gtfs_realtime/vehicle-positions-for-agency/1.pb?key=TEST

Here, replace localhost:8080 with the hostname and port of your OneBusAway API server. Data will be requested for a particular agency, as specified by the agency id encoded directly in the URL (“1” in the example urls).

Parameters

  • removeAgencyIds=true - By default, entity ids are prefixed with agency ids in the OBA system (eg. 1_456, where 1 is the agency id and 456 is the entity id). If the removeAgencyIds parameter is specified, the agency id prefixes will be stripped from ids in the resulting GTFS-realtime feed.
  • time=… - By default, the GTFS-realtime feeds represent the status of the system right now. However, the system can also be queried at a specific time. This can be useful for testing. See timestamps for details on the format of the time parameter.

Output Format

By default, these methods return GTFS-realtime data encoded as a binary protocol buffer, per the GTFS-realtime spec. To make it easier to debug your system, we also provide a simple way to see a textual representation of each GTFS-realtime feed as well. Simple switch the “.pb” extension in the URL with “.pbtext”. For example:

Modules

The GTFS-realtime export API is powered by the onebusaway-api-webapp module.