Live Transit Updates
What is Live Transit Updates for Google Maps?
Live Transit Updates is a service providing real-time transit updates to users of Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile. These updates include live departure and arrival times to transit stations, as well as service alerts.
What does Live Transit Updates mean for you as a transit partner?
Providing transit updates in real-time to users greatly enhances their experience of your transit services. Providing up-to-date information about current arrival and departure times allows users to plan their trips even more smoothly. And, in case of an unfortunate delay, a rider would be relieved to know that they can stay home a little bit longer.
How does it work?
At this time, Live Transit Updates provide 2 types of real-time updates to users: live departure times and service alerts. These updates should be provided in feeds by transit partners. We created the
GTFS-realtime feed format that complements the widely used
GTFS format for static transit schedules. Your feed needs to be available on a location where we can fetch it periodically. The updates in the feed will be immediately processed as Live Transit Updates information.
I want to participate. Where do I start?
In order for Google to provide live updates on your fleet, we need to have your static schedule information available through Google Maps first. If you don’t provide your static schedule information yet, please follow the instructions to participate.
If your static transit information is available in Google Maps, please fill out the
contact form. We will get back to you on how to create the appropriate feeds with real-time updates.
Useful resources
GTFS-realtime specification
GTFS specification