Data quality

A planner is only as good as its feed. These are the checks we ran on Bogotá and that are worth repeating for any city; the apps are already prepared for each case.

Static GTFS

• Validity and versioning: feed_info.txt with valid dates and a feed_version that changes on every publication. A stable URL (latest.zip) keeps consumers from getting stuck on old versions.
• Calendars: a single service_id for the whole year hides real variations. Check calendar_dates.txt for holidays.
• Fares: without fare_attributes/fare_rules or GTFS-Fares v2, apps cannot price trips. opentransit provides a configurable estimated flat fare per city, always labelled as such.
• Transfers and pathways: without transfers.txt or pathways.txt, transfer times are inferred geometrically.
• Accessibility: a constant wheelchair_boarding value on every stop is a default, not data. opentransit detects it (≥ 99 % of stops with the same value) and shows “not verified”.
• Headsigns: when trip_headsign repeats the route name, the apps drop it and use the pattern’s last stop.
• Duplicate shapes: when one commercial route is modelled as many GTFS routes, the API dedupes the network layer’s shapes.

GTFS-Realtime

• Latency and cadence: measure the median entity age; opentransit exposes health.realtime.entityAgeP50Seconds and flags stale above 90 s.
• Referential consistency: trip_id and stop_id must exist in the current static feed. Vehicles with unresolved trips still show by route but do not feed itineraries.
• TripUpdates coverage: some feeds publish a single stop_time_update per trip (the next stop). OTP propagates that delay backwards; opentransit only labels “live” what really is and fills the rest with “scheduled”.
• CORS: if the feed blocks browser origins, the API must proxy it (opentransit does).

GBFS

• Version 3.0: names are language arrays and availability is num_vehicles_available.
• Pricing plans: filter test or promotional plans before estimating a single trip’s cost.
• Stations outside the bbox or from another city in the same feed: OTP logs them as unlinked; harmless.

OpenStreetMap

The walking and cycling graph comes from OSM. Make sure the extract covers the whole bbox and that large stations have mapped entrances; the services layer (toilets, ATMs, bike parking) comes from there too.