Operational Data Standard

The Operational Data Standard (ODS) is an open standard for describing scheduled transit operations. ODS leverages the existing General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and extends it to include information about personnel and non-revenue service. These concepts are necessary for transit operators to be able to run a scheduled service.

Overview

Transit providers need the systems they use to schedule and operate their service to be interoperable. Interoperability is best achieved through open standards. While GTFS is a very successful existing open standard, it is designed for giving information to transit riders, and, thus, is missing key concepts that are necessary for transit providers.

ODS is a proposal for a new open standard to define deadheads and runs. ODS is based on, and includes references to, GTFS-static files. ODS is proposed as a standard separate from GTFS in order to preserve the privacy of internal operations data.

View the full ODS specification.