Places

Transitland labels each agency with the populated places and states or provinces it serves, using an automated process. The process is inexact, but it enables browsing Transitland operators by places across the world and places data in the REST API endpoints for agencies and operators.

Place-matching process

When a feed version is imported, Transitland matches each agency's stops to the nearest populated place within 40 km and to the state or province that contains them. Each place match has a rank: the share of the agency's scheduled stop visits that fall in that place. Matches with a rank of 5% or less are dropped, and the REST API agencies endpoint returns matches with a rank above 20%. An agency may have more than one place match, in which case the matches are sorted by rank.

Stops also include a place object with the country and state or province that contains the stop (for example, adm0_iso: "US" and adm1_iso: "US-CA").

Source of place geographies

Transitland's place-matching process uses the following 1:10m cultural vector layers from the Natural Earth project:

US Census geographies

For finer-grained geography in the United States, the GraphQL API provides a census_geographies field on agencies, routes, and stops. It returns US Census geographies, such as TIGER/Line tracts and American Community Survey (ACS) tables, near or intersecting the entity. The census_datasets query lists the available datasets.