California GTFS Quality Dashboard

Welcome to California’s statewide dashboard for transit passenger information quality. This tool is created and managed by the California Integrated Travel Project (Cal-ITP), in partnership with Caltrans’ Division of Rail and Mass Transportation, to make travel simpler and more cost-effective for everyone.

A key Caltrans objective is helping transit riders plan their trips using data that is both complete and accurate. While transit data comes in many forms, only one format—the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS)—lets any new or existing app easily consume and publish transit data for riders. Cal-ITP has created this data dashboard with support from DRMT to help ensure that your GTFS data quality will meet your riders’ expectations for convenience and reliability, and the GTFS standard.

Directory of GTFS Quality Reports

About GTFS data quality

Anyone planning a transit journey through their favorite trip planning application is almost certainly using GTFS data. Transit providers can publish this format to describe where their vehicles are supposed to go, when they’re supposed to get there, and where they actually are in real time, as well as other useful information like whether vehicles accept bicycles or what it will cost to board. Trip planning applications like Google Maps and the Transit App turn this information into a user-friendly experience for transit riders. But if there are unexpected issues with that data, the rider may get incorrect information—or none at all.

Read more
about what Caltrans considers good GTFS data and why.

How to use this website

To help detect issues with transit data, MobilityData, which maintains the GTFS standard, manages an open-source GTFS validator. This validator, used by Google Maps and other major trip planning services, represents a wide range of potential issues. Cal-ITP deployed its own instance of the validator for the benefit of all California transit providers. Each month, Cal-ITP will run the validator on every California transit provider’s GTFS feeds and compile results into a PDF report.

A complete archive of these reports is available in the directory. Transit providers and their vendors can also request that these monthly reports be automatically sent to them via email by contacting our GTFS Helpdesk at [email protected].

How to use these reports

Each report contains three sections:

  1. A summary of the service operations represented in the most recent version of your published GTFS feed. This identifies operations that have been miscoded.
  2. A list of validation issues identified by the canonical GTFS Validator. Each error and warning references this set of validation rules.
  3. A check for files and fields that are recommended by the GTFS Best Practices and California Minimum GTFS Guidelines. If data is missing, ask your vendor if they have plans to include this data. If they don’t, contact the Cal-ITP Helpdesk ([email protected]) for support.

These reports are intended to be shared with vendors and provide actionable guidance for them to improve the data they produce on riders' behalves.

I’m a California transit provider and I don’t see my brand listed here

GTFS Schedule data currently can only represent fixed-route and fixed-schedule transit operations, so entirely on-demand services such as paratransit will not be listed on this dashboard. If you represent a California transit provider with fixed route and fixed schedule service with a GTFS feed that is missing from this list, please send the stable URL for your GTFS Schedule data to the Cal-ITP Helpdesk at [email protected]. If you’re a California transit provider that wants GTFS data but doesn’t have it, or have related questions, you can contact the Helpdesk to take advantage of our available technical services.

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