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livable-lynchburg / lynchburg-road-issues

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GTFS transit data from GTLC is improperly packaged, making it difficult to use or analyze #190

Closed partytax closed 6 months ago

partytax commented 6 months ago

Non-geographic

Latest file in question can be found at http://gltconline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/GTFS_GLTC.zip

This is the structure of the zip file:

├── GTFS_GLTC
│   ├── agency.txt
│   ├── calendar_dates.txt
│   ├── calendar.txt
│   ├── routes.txt
│   ├── shapes.txt
│   ├── stops.txt
│   ├── stop_times.txt
│   ├── transfers.txt
│   └── trips.txt
└── __MACOSX
    └── GTFS_GLTC

Per https://gtfs.org/schedule/reference/#file-requirements , which states "All dataset files must be zipped together. The files must reside at the root level directly, not in a subfolder.", the structure should look like this:

├── agency.txt
├── calendar_dates.txt
├── calendar.txt
├── routes.txt
├── shapes.txt
├── stops.txt
├── stop_times.txt
├── transfers.txt
└── trips.txt
partytax commented 6 months ago

Reported to Wendell Watts, the person who deals with this stuff at GLTC:

Good afternoon. Josh Moore provided your contact information when I inquired about who I should report GTFS data issues to. Today I tried to do some analysis of routes and discovered that the GTFS zip file provided on the website would not open in my GTFS reader. It turned out that the zip file does not follow the GTFS file specification because it has the "txt" files within a folder called "GTFS_GLTC" rather than on the top level of the zip archive. Here's the text of the requirement from gtfs [dot] org: "All dataset files must be zipped together. The files must reside at the root level directly, not in a subfolder." I'm guessing this is just the way the software spits out the data. Are you using Remix for that, or is it still Trillium? Thanks in advance for your help! Nathan

partytax commented 6 months ago

Received response from Wendell Watts:

Good afternoon Nathan,

My apologies for the late response with this. We do use trillium for the feed that we post to our website. I typically send it as a zip folder that contains all of the files but the wires may have gotten crossed on the last version. I did a re export today and it's up on the website.

Thanks!

Wendell Watts, II

Operations Assistant | (o) 434.485.8329 | (f) 434.528.4582

Downloaded and tested in GTFS-GO plugin for QGIS and it works great. All the files are packaged on the top level.

partytax commented 6 months ago

Thanked Wendell Watts for assistance. Closing.