Regional Public Transportation GIS Architecture and Data Model

Many transportation planning organizations seek to better utilize public transportation data within a holistic planning process that involves other modes of transportation. However, achieving this goal is difficult if obtaining current public transportation network data and integrating this information into an enterprise GIS database is very effort-intensive.

The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) District 7 identified the need to obtain and view spatial data from many public transportation agencies within the district and region to aid in their multimodal planning efforts. A research team at the University of South Florida’s National Center for Transit Research completed a prototype Regional Public Transportation GIS Architecture and Data Model in May 2012 . The research project has produced tools that automatically download new GTFS datasets from the regional transit agencies and store them in the FDOT D7 enterprise geodatabase. Additionally, a web-application has been developed to visualize and query transit data alongside other data, such as proposed, planned, and in-progress road construction projects. The open-source software is available under the Apache 2.0 license on Github .