Trillium Solutions: "Need to develop with transit data? Go to Transitland."

A guest post by Thomas Craig, the operations manager at Trillium Solutions. Trillium is a professional services firm that creates and manages GTFS feeds for over 200 transit agencies around North America. They also help agencies design websites and other ways of using software to reach riders. Trillium has recently contributed many of the feeds under its management to Transitland, as Thomas described recently on the Trillium blog:

Looking for access to GTFS data for an agency managed or supported by Trillium to utilize in an app you're building? Turn to Transitland, an open-source GTFS aggregator and API hosted and maintained by Mapzen.

At Trillium we make and maintain GTFS data for about 200 transit agencies across the US. Transitland is, we think, the most complete API through which to access transit information across multiple agencies. It's nicely documented, making it a snap to work with.

We work with every one of our agencies to establish the most open data sharing allowable. Of the about 200 agencies we work with, we share over 160 publicly. All are now available through Transitland.

Some Transitland's features are really super cool. Need to find the nearest OSM way to a stop location? Mapzen has you covered. Want access to schedules for an agency, including frequencies? The schedules API is your friend.

Exciting integrations with other Mapzen technology is moving forward too: most agencies with data in Transitland are accessible through Mapzen's transit routing engine.

The most important part of Transitland is its future. Its robust API is a foundation on which an abundant market of apps can grow. Transitland has no cost, and is liberal with usage–and Mapzen is working with partners to build a community around the technology. That community and shared need is the driving force that we think will keep Transitland evolving. Transitland is likely to become a critical part of the open-source stack in tomorrow's transit applications.