Routes

Routes are routes.txt entities imported from GTFS, and include the same basic structure and fields, plus some additional metadata and derived information. A route is a collection of trips, where each trip represents scheduled service to stops on a given day and time.

Each route includes a representative geometry assembled from the shapes its trips use. In each direction, a shape is included if it carries more than 20% of that direction's trips, and the longest shape in each direction is always included. Shapes with a point at 0,0 or a segment longer than 1,000 km are left out.

Shapes from the feed's shapes.txt are preferred. When a route has none, Transitland uses shapes it generates from the stop-to-stop path of trips that lack a shape_id. The first line in the geometry is the shape used by the most trips. Full shapes are available when accessing individual trips.

Onestop ID values are automatically generated for every route from a geohash of the stops the route visits and the route's route_short_name (or route_long_name when there is no short name). Two very similar routes may generate the same Onestop ID value, in which case more than one route is returned when searching by Onestop ID.

Every route in Transitland has a route_type, stored as the value given in the feed. The allowable values are the basic route types from the GTFS specification and the extended route types.

transitland-lib maps each extended route type to the basic route type it is a kind of. The GraphQL and REST APIs return this as route_type_basic on routes, and as route_types_basic on agencies and operators. A route_type that is already basic, or that is not a known extended type, is returned unchanged.

Route type codes can be used to query the routes REST endpoint with the route_type and route_types query parameters, and the stops REST endpoint with the served_by_route_type query parameter. These filters match the stored route_type exactly: route_type=3 returns routes coded as 3, and does not include routes coded as 700 (Bus Service) or other extended bus types.

Basic route types

Extended route types

Extended types with no close basic equivalent, such as air, taxi, and self-drive services, map to Bus (3).

The latest version of this mapping is maintained in transitland-lib.