Problem

MobilityData’s heard a number of pains from the community about the GTFS best practices and the spec’s SHOULD statements living in two different places:

• Producers do not always refer to the best practices, and so moving these into the official spec would give the best practices greater visibility and improve data quality for everyone

• Merging the best practices in the spec would make it easier for regulators to point producers to one place to get the information they need to create their GTFS feeds

Solution

Based on this feedback, MobilityData is interested in working to merge the best practices into the official spec. We started this work by removing best practices already covered by the spec in 2021. We recognize this is a big effort that will require much community discussion, so we want to start with a small section as a pilot to see if we can gain momentum on this and make some incremental changes that will be high value.

We’ve seen some initial public interest in merging the Dataset Publishing and General Practices section of the Best Practices into the spec (Slack conversation here - you can join the MobilityData slack to see the discussion). Based on this, we’re seeking more feedback to assess interest and get insight.

Recommended Scope

MobilityData suggests keeping the scope to the minimum updates required for the Dataset Publishing and General Practices section to be merged into the official spec. This would include

• Updating the link to the Google transitfeed tool merge function so it references a list of merge tools instead
• Making all SHOULD language explicit

There would be no changes to the severity of any statements - they would all remain SHOULD statements.

We do recognize there are outstanding issues and PRs related to this section, which we recommend resolving in future iterations. If a PR was voted on and passed, MobilityData would create issues in google/transit that link to the original best practices discussions so the work can continue.

List of outstanding discussions related to the Dataset Publishing and General Practices section (feel free to add others):

MobilityData/GTFS_Schedule_Best-Practices#49
MobilityData/GTFS_Schedule_Best-Practices#48
MobilityData/GTFS_Schedule_Best-Practices#40