Investigate GTFS for bus schedules

[junosuarez]

GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) is a standard for storing transit schedules. In Atlanta, this data is available at http://www.itsmarta.com/developer.aspx

For DIY Bus Signs, we'll need:

• [ ] a way to find bus stops
• [ ] which routes serve that bus stop
• [ ] time tables for when buses come to that stop
• [ ] bus stop IDs (if available)

In this thread I'll add resources for reading from it and figure out what we need.

[junosuarez]

GTFS spec documentation: https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/

[japanjeff]

I'm not sure if we'll be able to use google maps to let someone pick a bus stop, but it looks like the "stop id" shown in the screenshot matches up with stop_code column in the stops.txt file.

Edit: To make life easier, we could just have the user enter "stop id" and then do queries based on that for the time-being.

[japanjeff]

Here's a diagram showing how the various parts of the GTFS with their relation and columns we'll probably need. Hopefully I haven't made any mistakes (fingers-crossed).

[junosuarez]

/cc @dget ^