OC Transpo is adopting the North American industry standard General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Realtime for its next arrivals open data feed.
We are providing early access to our GTFS Schedule and GTFS Realtime data as beta feeds to provide the open data community with as much time as possible to migrate their applications. This is an opportunity for developers to have a first look. As GTFS is an open standard, please refer to gtfs.org Getting Started - General Transit Feed Specification with any questions about the feed specifications.
Our current data feed API 2.0 will continue to be available and supported but will eventually be replaced with the new OC Transpo GTFS Realtime open data feed.
The final and official version of the GTFS Realtime feed will be released later in 2024. Until that time, the beta feed should be used for development purposes, with the understanding that disruptions may occur, data issues may not be addressed and rectified with the speed of a production feed, and that data fields and content may change suddenly as issues are identified, rectified, and provided as a new release.
OC Transpo has resources available for developers to create applications for desktop, web or mobile devices.
The GTFS Schedule data contains the same schedule data that supports OC Transpo’s online travel planner and is needed to use the new GTFS-RT feed or legacy OC Transpo API.
The GTFS Schedule file has changed for the GTFS-RT feed to better conform to GTFS standards. The new GTFS Schedule file must be used in conjunction with GTFS-RT.
Below you will find the GTFS schedule and link to developers portal for GTFS-Realtime:
Subscribe to OC Transpo’s RSS feeds using the following urls:
The Open Data Service contains two methods that enable you to:
The stop summary method provides data on route direction and route heading (the same title on the front of the bus). The trips method provides data on the next 3 trips, by appropriate route, for a given stop. Trip data includes arrival time and GPS related information. A full detailed overview of the API is provided in the Documentation section.
The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is an open format developed by Google, maintained by MobilityData and now used as an international standard to incorporate transit information into applications that include geographic data. Because this is an open and freely available format, anyone can use the data to create their own applications. This feed has been available to the public from OC Transpo since 2008.
There has been significant interest in transit data. While we cannot provide support in creating applications, we will provide you with some helpful resources. If you have any questions, suggestions or concerns regarding how GTFS-realtime or the legacy OC Transpo API 2.0 works, please reach out to octranspo-dev@ottawa.ca.
This allows us to communicate with you about your account, and to inform you about any service or policy changes, as well as scheduled maintenance outages or issues.
OC Transpo and the City of Ottawa allow registered API key holders to use the Live Next Bus Arrival Data for both non-commercial and commercial purposes.
Under normal operation, the GPS data is sent from the buses to the server every 30 seconds using cellular technology. Inherently, the cellular technology may present gaps in connectivity as vehicles move. It is OC Transpo’s experience, based on more than ten years of GPS usage, that about 5% of the time - due to a multitude of reasons such as equipment defects, latency and network coverage - we don’t have the exact position of the buses, and this will effect the data feed. Although reasonable efforts have been made in providing this service, we cannot guarantee its accuracy, completeness or accuracy.
Because of the strain on the technological infrastructure caused by such practices, we do not allow developers to use the API key for data harvesting. OC Transpo is presently studying a way to make available historical GPS data that might be of interest to the Open Data community.