GTFS is an abbreviation for General Transit Feed Specification, a standard which “defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information” (source).
The idea of this project is to generate beautiful and informative visualizations from publicly available GTFS datasets. The program draws the routes which transportation entities take and emphasizes the ones which are frequented more often by painting them thicker and in a stronger opacity.
The thickness and color intensity of the drawn lines is chosen using
log(trips_happening_on_this_shape_id). All trips in the GTFS feed
are counted (not just days or a week).
Project status: The project works with Processing 2.2.1, but is no longer actively maintained. You will find information on how to generate a visualization for a custom GTFS feed below the gallery: How to generate a visualization.
Known problems: The GTFS parser currently loads the GTFS in memory.
This means large GTFS feeds will cause problems, if your machine does
not provide sufficient RAM.
There are issues when running the sketch in Processing 3.x.
The colors currenltly used are:
tram #0000ff blue
subway, metro #00ff00 green
rail, inter-city #ffff00 yellow
bus #ff0000 red
ferry #00ffff cyan
cable car #fee0d2 ocker
gondola #ff00ff purple
funicular #ffffff white
Rendering based on an inofficial GTFS feed. There is an official one available, though it does (not yet?) include shapes.
Download: Large PNG (0.4 MB), PDF (0.12 MB)
Rendering based on the official feed by the Empresa Municipal de Transportes. (March 12, 2014)
Download: Large PNG (1.4 MB), PDF (0.4 MB)
Rendering based on the official feed by the Metropolitan Transit System (MTS). (March 12, 2014)
Download: Large PNG (0.5 MB), PDF (0.6 MB)
Rendering based on the official feed by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. (March 14, 2014)
Download: Large PNG (0.9 MB),
Rendering based on the official feed by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. (March 12, 2014)
Download: Large PNG (1 MB), PDF (1.1 MB)
Rendering based on the official feed by DC Circulator. (March 13, 2014)
Download: Large PNG (1.2 MB)
Rendering based on the official feed by the Miami Dade Transit. (March 13, 2014)
Download: Large PNG (0.3 MB), PDF (0.12 MB)
I think the visualizations look quite beautiful and have started to
compile a series of A0 posters. Click on the preview image to open
the PDF. The templates can be found in ./posters/.
Click on the images to get a larger preview.
The posters can be downloaded here:
Download and install node.js and npm.
$ git clone https://github.com/cmichi/gtfs-visualizations.git
$ cd gtfs-visualizations/
$ npm install
$ make render gtfs=ulm
Based on the GTFS files in ./gtfs/ulm/ this will generate:
./output/ulm/
./output/ulm/data.lines
./output/ulm/maxmin.lines
# containing the maximum and minimum count of trips on a shape
# in this GTFS feed
Download Processing 2.0. Then open
the sketch ./processing/processing.pde within Processing.
Execute it and a file ./output/ulm_large.pdf will be generated.
Change those lines within ./processing/processing.pde :
cities = new String[1];
cities[0] = "ulm";
to the city you want to display, e.g. cities[1] = "san-diego";.
Make sure ./gtfs/san-diego/ exists. Also make sure there is a shape file
(./gtfs/san-diego/shapes.txt) available!
Execute $ make render gtfs=san-diego and after this is finished the
Processing sketch ./processing/processing.pde. You will then find your
visualization generated in ./output/san-diego.png.
For certain cities (e.g. Los Angeles) multiple separate GTFS feeds are available (e.g. bus, metro, etc.). To render multiple GTFS feeds into the visualization you can adapt the cities array:
cities = new String[2];
cities[0] = "los-angeles";
cities[1] = "los-angeles-metro";
Within ./render.js change
var render_area = {width: 600, height: 600};
Within ./processing/processing.pde change
size(700, 700);
See the sketch ./processing/processing.pde and search this block:
drawRoute("7", #ffffff); // funicular
drawRoute("6", #ffffff); // gondola
drawRoute("5", #ffffff); // cable car
drawRoute("4", #ffffff); // ferry
drawRoute("3", #ff0000); // bus
drawRoute("2", #ffffff); // rail, inter-city
drawRoute("1", #ffffff); // subway, metro
drawRoute("0", #0000ff); // tram
These are the default colors used. You are free to adapt them.
-
The green and red color combination should be done better (persons with red/green disabilities might have problems). Use other color scheme.
-
GTFS provides a field
route_color. Supporting this would be nice. Colors right now are hardcoded.
- Roman Prokofyev improved the parser. Beforehand an entire file was loaded and then parsed, he switched to line-by-line parsing.
The gallery photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Copyright (c) 2013-2014
Michael Mueller <http://micha.elmueller.net/>
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"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
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permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
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