Developers

OC Transpo has adopted the North American industry standard General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Realtime for its next arrivals open data feed. Resources are available below for developers to create applications for desktop, web or mobile devices:

GTFS Schedule Download

The GTFS Schedule data supports OC Transpo’s online travel planner and is needed to use the new GTFS-RT feed.

Below you will find the GTFS schedule and link to developers portal for GTFS-Realtime:

RSS Feeds

Subscribe to OC Transpo’s RSS feeds using the following urls:

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What data is accessible via the API?

The Open Data Service contains two methods that enable you to:

  • Get a summary for a stop
  • Get trips for a stop

The stop summary method provides data on route direction and route heading (the same title on the front of the bus). The trips method provides data on the next 3 trips, by appropriate route, for a given stop. Trip data includes arrival time and GPS related information. A full detailed overview of the API is provided in the Documentation section.

2. What is the General Transit Feed Specification?

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is an open format developed by Google, maintained by MobilityData and now used as an international standard to incorporate transit information into applications that include geographic data. Because this is an open and freely available format, anyone can use the data to create their own applications. This feed has been available to the public from OC Transpo since 2008.

3. Do you offer technical support?

There has been significant interest in transit data. While we cannot provide support in creating applications, we will provide you with some helpful resources. If you have any questions, suggestions or concerns regarding how GTFS-realtime or the legacy OC Transpo API 2.0 works, please reach out to octranspo-dev@ottawa.ca.

4. Why do I need to provide my personal information to receive an API key?

This allows us to communicate with you about your account, and to inform you about any service or policy changes, as well as scheduled maintenance outages or issues.

5. Are there any restrictions on what I can do with the data?

OC Transpo and the City of Ottawa allow registered API key holders to use the Live Next Bus Arrival Data for both non-commercial and commercial purposes.

6. How real-time is "real-time"? Is the data updated continuously or is there some sort of delay?

Under normal operation, the GPS data is sent from the buses to the server every 30 seconds using cellular technology. Inherently, the cellular technology may present gaps in connectivity as vehicles move. It is OC Transpo’s experience, based on more than ten years of GPS usage, that about 5% of the time - due to a multitude of reasons such as equipment defects, latency and network coverage - we don’t have the exact position of the buses, and this will effect the data feed. Although reasonable efforts have been made in providing this service, we cannot guarantee its accuracy, completeness or accuracy.

7. In the Terms of Service, you prohibit mass harvesting. If I want to create a database of OC Transpo’s transit data, how can I access it?

Because of the strain on the technological infrastructure caused by such practices, we do not allow developers to use the API key for data harvesting. OC Transpo is presently studying a way to make available historical GPS data that might be of interest to the Open Data community.