gtfs-utils

gtfs-utils is a utility library for reading and filtering gtfs files that can handle large datasets.

Simple example

Filter a gtfs feed by bounding box and save it to a new directory

import gtfs_utils
from gtfs_utils.filter import BoundsFilter

gtfs = gtfs_utils.load_gtfs('vienna.zip', lazy=False)
filtered_gtfs = gtfs_utils.filter_gtfs(gtfs, [BoundsFilter(bounds=[16.2, 47.95, 16.35, 48.1], complete_trips=True)])
filtered_gtfs.save('vienna_filtered')

or as a command-line tool:

gtfs-utils filter vienna.zip -b '[16.2, 47.95, 16.35, 48.1]' --complete-trips -o vienna-filtered.zip

or via docker

docker run -t -v "${PWD}:/data" ghcr.io/triply-at/gtfs-utils gtfs-utils filter /data/vienna.zip -b '[16.2, 47.95, 16.35, 48.1]' --complete-trips -o /data/vienna-filtered.zip

Installation

pip install gtfsutils

With uv you can also directly run the latest version of the tool without installing it:

uvx gtfsutils filter data -b '[16.2, 47.95, 16.35, 48.1]' --complete-trips -o vienna-filtered

Usage

Python package

Check the tests for example usages as a python package.

Command-line tool

Usage: gtfs-utils [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

╭─ Options ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ --version                       Print version and exit                                           │
│ --verbose             -v        Verbose output                                                   │
│ --install-completion            Install completion for the current shell.                        │
│ --show-completion               Show completion for the current shell, to copy it or customize   │
│                                 the installation.                                                │
│ --help                          Show this message and exit.                                      │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
╭─ Commands ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ bounds        Get the bounding box of a GTFS feed                                                │
│ route-types   List existing route types and number of routes in a GTFS feed                      │
│ info          Get information about a GTFS feed                                                  │
│ filter        Filter a GTFS feed                                                                 │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

For each command, you can get more information by running gtfs-utils <command> --help.

Each command provides the following base options:

• --lazy: Load the GTFS feed lazily (using dask). This can be useful for large feeds, but is significantly slower.
• --no-lazy: Load the GTFS feed eagerly. This is a lot faster, but requires more memory.

bounds

Prints the bounding box of a gtfs feed in [minLon, minLat, maxLon, maxLat] format.

gtfs-utils bounds vienna.zip
> Bounding Box:   [16.19777442, 47.99950209, 16.54940197, 48.30111117]

route-types

Prints the existing route types and the number of routes for each type in a gtfs feed.

gtfs-utils route-types vienna.zip
> Route Types:    {3: 365, 0: 109, 1: 23}

Run gtfs-utils route-types --help for more options.

info

Prints the existing route types and the number of routes for each type in a gtfs feed.

gtfs-utils info vienna.zip
> Info on GTFS file `vienna.zip`

Bounding Box:   [16.19777442, 47.99950209, 16.54940197, 48.30111117]
Calendar date range:    15.12.2024 - 13.12.2025

            File Sizes
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ File           ┃           Rows ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ agency         │         2 rows │
│ calendar_dates │    14_033 rows │
│ calendar       │       412 rows │
│ routes         │       497 rows │
│ stop_times     │ 3_991_121 rows │
│ stops          │     4_541 rows │
│ trips          │   213_691 rows │
└────────────────┴────────────────┘

                        Route Types
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃         Route Type          ┃ Route Type ID ┃   # Routes ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│             Bus             │       3       │ 365 routes │
│ Tram, Streetcar, Light rail │       0       │ 109 routes │
│        Subway, Metro        │       1       │  23 routes │
└─────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴────────────┘

Run gtfs-utils info --help for more options.

filter

Filters a gtfs feed by a set of filters.

gtfs-utils filter vienna.zip -b '[16.2, 47.95, 16.35, 48.1]' --complete-trips -o vienna-filtered.zip
> Wrote output to "vienna-filtered.zip"

Requires a ---output/-o option to specify the output directory or file.

Currently supported filters:

• Bounds: Filter by bounding box. Use the -b or --bounds option to specify the bounding box in [minLon, minLat, maxLon, maxLat] format.
• Route Types: Filter by route types. Use the --route-types option to specify the route types to keep.

Run gtfs-utils filter --help for all options.

Development Setup

In order to get started developing, please follow the steps below:

• Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/triply-at/gtfs-utils and cd into the directory
• Install uv if you haven't already
• Install the pre-commit hooks by running uv run pre-commit install

The commit hooks should automatically fail on any lint and formatting errors (checked through ruff). You can also run the checks manually by running uv run ruff check --fix and uv run ruff format.

If you want to run the tests, you can do so by running uv run pytest. By default, most tests are executed with both eager and lazy loading. To speed up local tests, you can run only the eager tests with uv run pytest -m 'not slow'.

Bugs

Please report any bugs that you encounter on the issue tracker. If you can, feel free to create a pull request to solve the issue. We welcome any contributions.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Copyright (C) 2025 triply GmbH
Chris Stelzmüller <c.stelzmueller@triply.at>
Luis Nachtigall <l.nachtigall@triply.at>

Testing Data

For testing purposes, GTFS data from Vienna's transit agency is used. GTFS Transport Schedules Vienna by Wiener Linien GmbH & Co KG are licensed under CC BY 4.0.