The adopted portion of GTFS Fares v2 is now part of our Validator!

MobilityData is thrilled to bring you the v4 release of our Canonical GTFS Schedule Validator.

October 31st, 2022, Montreal, Quebec, Canada —The Canonical GTFS Schedule Validator that MobilityData has been providing since 2019 with the help of the GTFS community is seeing more and more success. It is now used by major stakeholders such as Transit app, Google, ITO World, and Moovit, which makes our vision come to life – using and collaborating on the same key tools creates a shared understanding of what data quality is Additionally, we can collectively provide public transit riders the high-quality directions they deserve. 

We’re excited to bring you the v4 release! It contains validation rules for the base implementation for Fares v2, and much more. A big thanks to our awesome contributors!

Continue reading to see what’s new!

💡The specification is evolving, and so is the validator

The v4 release includes new validation rules to represent the base implementation of the Fares v2 extension, which was adopted in May 2022. This extension proposal is under active discussion, and we will continue to update the validator as other parts of the extension get adopted.

👩‍💻How we use the validator to support the GTFS community

Did you know that MobilityData also maintains the Mobility Database, a repository of 1800+ datasets representing 62 countries?  We use this data to evaluate the impact of every new rule added to the validator. If additional errors are introduced in existing data, we publish a major release and let the affected data producers know. We realized that this was the case with the addition of Fares v2.  Now, for every dataset affected MobilityData will reach out directly to the producers, and support them with updating the data if needed.

These analytics also help our team find which areas of the specification are not implemented in a consistent way, and we are able to improve the specification and related documentation as a result.

👥This project is a shared effort

Our Open Source community is growing, and this project would not exist without them. For this release, we want to extend a special shout-out to:

• Cal-ITP, who worked on adding rules to check for the GTFS Best Practices
• Google, who worked on adding the Fares v2 base implementation rules
• Everyone that opened GitHub issues to bring ideas and bugs to our attention
• Everyone that participated in discussing how to interpret the specification on our slack channel, so that we all understand a spec violation in the same way

If you’d like to read more about this release, you can access the complete release notes on the GitHub repository here.

Are you on our slack? We have different channels where you can ask questions, help others, and participate in the discussions. Here is the form to get your invite! 

Wondering who uses this validator? See the complete list of organizations here.