If you follow us on any social media handle then you may have heard the news that TransitScreen has recently acquired the company TransitFeeds and has rebranded it as OpenMobilityData. We’ve paired up with MobilityData to accelerate the creation and sharing of global public transit, urban transportation, and shared mobility data.
What is OpenMobilityData? TransitFeeds was the most popular mobility data commons, from its creator, Quentin Zervaas. TransitFeeds served 6 million data requests annually for nearly 1,000 transit data feeds from 39 countries. It’s the only site that supports both the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification, originally created by TriMet and Google) and GTFS-Realtime data standards.
“The mobility industry badly needs an open data commons with integrated tools for creating and editing mobility information, just like you can edit Wikipedia,” says TransitScreen CEO Matt Caywood. “Data creators want to contribute their time and effort to open platforms. OpenMobilityData will do for mobility data what OpenStreetMap did for geographic data.”
OpenMobilityData will be the first data commons to fully integrate with transit data editors to update data automatically. The launch partner (which include TransLoc Architect, GTFS Manager from Trillium Solutions, and GTFS Editor from Conveyal) are excited to get the first service of its kind off the ground — a service that will give the power of transportation information back into the hands of the public.
“Complete and high-quality data is the foundation upon which the mobility industry is being built,” said Leo Frachet, Technical Co-Director at MobilityData. “OpenMobilityData provides a neutral home for the whole industry to publish, visualize, and explore this data.”
