Mobility Database

What you can build

• Pick the right transit feed for a property

  Shuttle Timing needs the local agency's GTFS Realtime feed. The catalog returns the feeds inside your bounding box with their producer URLs and authentication rules, and the operator proposes which one to wire up.

  With Shuttle Timing

• Catch a feed going stale before a schedule job does

  Data Freshness reads availability checks and each dataset's downloaded_at, then proposes a notice when a feed you rely on fails its checks or has run past its service date range.

  With Data Freshness

• Move off a deprecated feed

  Integration Health watches status and redirects on the feeds you consume and proposes a switch to the target_id feed when the old one is marked deprecated or inactive.

  With Integration Health

Requirements

• A Mobility Database account, which is free, and its refresh token
• country_code, municipality, or dataset_latitudes and dataset_longitudes values for the areas whose feeds you want
• Credentials for any feed whose source_info reports authentication_type 1 or 2; the feed producer issues those, not MobilityData
• A downstream reader for the GTFS, GTFS Realtime, or GBFS data itself; the catalog points to feeds rather than serving vehicle positions

Authentication

A Bearer access token from POST /v1/tokens/access, generated from the long-lived refresh token shown in your Mobility Database account after sign-up; access tokens expire after one hour.

Limits

• The API returns at most 3500 feeds per call and at most 100 validation reports or availability checks per call; page with offset
• Datasets, validation reports, and availability checks exist only for GTFS feeds; GTFS Realtime and GBFS feeds are cataloged, not mirrored
• The reliability seal, validation history, and continuous coverage endpoints are tagged beta in the API specification
• This listing is a reference. Fibric builds the integration under a managed deployment when you request it

Questions and answers

Does the API serve vehicle positions or trip updates?

No. It catalogs feeds. A GTFS Realtime entry lists its entity_types (vp for vehicle positions, tu for trip updates, sa for service alerts) and its producer_url. You read the realtime data from that URL, following the authentication_type and authentication_info_url the entry reports.

How current are the datasets and validation reports?

MobilityData checks each GTFS feed for a new dataset once a day and stores the new file with its hash, downloaded_at, and a report from the Canonical GTFS Schedule Validator. The catalog CSV on GitHub is updated one to three times a month; the API reads the database directly.

What license covers the catalog?

MobilityData releases the catalog metadata under Creative Commons CC0. Each feed's own data carries its producer's terms, which the entry's license_url points to. The API and catalog code are under the Apache 2.0 license.