Transitland · · 1 min read

Use Transitland v2 to Search Across Operators, Feeds, and Routes

Here's one of our favorite new additions to Transitland v2: search across all of the operators, feed records, and routes in Transitland.

Over the last year (or two?) we've been creating Transitland v2, a major rewrite of the platform's internals. Transitland v2 brings performance improvements, the option to deploy any number of customized Transitland installations (in addition to the "canonical" Transitland that lives here at transit.land), and useful new feature additions. Here's one of our favorite new additions: search across all of the operators, feed records, and routes in Transitland.

animated screenshot showing a user type 'Staten' in to the search field and click through to view the route page for the Staten Island Ferry in New York City

The new search functionality currently indexes millions of records and returns results quickly — very quickly! Try it yourself. Type into the search box in the upper right corner of this page and watch as the results are returned.

Search can also be scoped. For example, open up the Chicago Transit Authority operator page and you can search within that operator's stops and routes:

Developers, we welcome you to start thinking of ways you might want to integrate Transitland's search functionality into your own apps, websites, and creations. Search will be included in the upcoming Transitland v2 APIs.

Search is always complicated. There are questions of what to index, how to weight different parameters, and so on. For example, we are not yet including stops/stations in the global search at this point. We welcome feedback and bug reports.

Are you searching Transitland only to find that we do not have data for your favorite transit operator? Help expand Transitland's coverage by contributing to the Transitland Atlas, the open directory of feeds that powers Transitland's services.

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Transitland ·

How current is that schedule?

The GTFS Best Practices guide recommends publishing data for the current data plus at least 7 days in the future. We've used the Transitland archives to assess how many feeds meet this goal.