Once you’ve decided how you’ll submit your General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) realtime data, you’re ready to publish your feed in a staging environment so you can preview the results before they go live.
To publish your data, contact the Google team to provide the following information:
- Delivery method: Fetch or push? If you choose the push method, please send us your data as frequently as possible. Learn more about fetch and push data submission.
- URLs for each feed type: Service Alerts, Trip Updates, and Vehicle Positions (Tip: this is only necessary if you’re using the fetch method.) Learn more about GTFS-Realtime feed types.
- Encoding type: Is the content in binary or ASCII format? (Tip: Your final feed should be in binary format but you can use ASCII format for testing.)
- Accounts for preview: What are the Google email addresses for people who need to access the Transit partner dashboard to test the preview? Create a new Google account.
Once we receive your Realtime feed request, we’ll set up a preview of your feed. In the staging environment, you can check how your users find and interact with information from your Realtime feed. When your preview is ready, an email is sent to notify you.