Add your transit data to Google Maps

Currently over 500 cities world wide make their information available in Google Maps. For the complete coverage, please visit www.google.com/transit.

If you provide a transportation service that is open the the public, and operates with fixed schedules and routes, we welcome your participation - it is simple and free.

Process

1. Prepare a data feed according to General Transit Feed Specification and Best Practices document.
2. Validate the feed using the Feed Validator.
3. Inspect the feed in Schedule Viewer.
4. Zip the files in your feed. Name the zip file google_transit.zip.
5. Host the feed on a web server for Google to fetch. We support both HTTP and HTTPS.
6. Contact the Google Transit team to sign-up for the partnership
7. Google will be in touch to setup a private preview and have the agency complete an online agreement before launch.
8. Agency will test the data in the private preview until the result is satisfactory.
9. Launch!

Tools

Create a data feed

There are many ways for an agency to create a feed. Many agencies have created their own program to export the data based on General Transit Feed Specification. There are some useful tools that may help you create a Transit feed more easily:

• If you would like to use a spreadsheet to create the feed, there is an open source tool developed by Bob Heitzman from San Luis Obispo County. Full details is listed in a Google Groups discussion.
• If your agency uses schedule software such as Trapeze FX or GIRO HASTUS, your vendor may have an interface that helps you to export the data. Please contact them for details.
• Sign up to our agency user group to learn know-hows from your fellow agencies.

Locate stops

If you do not know the geo coordinates of your stops, you can download Google Earth, which shows the geo coordinates of every point on earth.

Validate the data feed:

Providing high quality data feed is critical. Google has created a few open source tools to help agencies to check the feed quality.

• Feed Validator: this tool should be used to check the feed format. No feed should be submitted to Google until it is free of format errors.
• Schedule Viewer: this tool helps agencies to visualize every route and stops in Google Maps. Agencies should use it to systematically check every route for stop locations, stop sequence, vehicle speed, and other important issues. Please refer to the document for details.
• Test in Google Maps: once Google accepts the Transit feed, Google will build a private preview for the agency to test. Since the agency knows the area the best, it is important that the agency thoroughly test the routes such as the most popular routes, and routes in holidays or weekends. Google will not launch the data until the agency confirms the quality, signs an online agreement, and the feed has passed Google engineer's inspection.

Host a Feed

Please follow these guidelines when hosting your GTFS feed.

• Place the feed in a directory that will always keep the same name, for example, http://myserver.agency.com/current/google_transit.zip.
• Enable directory listing on the directory where you host the feed file. The feed should be the only file in the directory.
• To change or update the feed, replace the old google_transit.zip with a new google_transit.zip. The new data will completely overwrite your old data. As a result, please ensure that your new feed has complete data as of the posting date. For example, if you post a new dataset on 12-8, the data must have service as of 12-8. This may require you to use our merge utility.
• Your IT/Networking teams should know that Google Maps periodically fetches transit feed data from the location that you specify, so that they do not change file permissions for your feed or otherwise block or break the data fetching process.