Fast library to read GTFS-realtime files into R data frames.
The package is installable from CRAN, and can be installed in the usual way:
install.packages('gtfsrealtime')It requires the current or previous release of R (currently 4.6 or
4.5); older versions are likely to work as well but will require
building code from scratch which requires a Rust development
environment. If you get errors about rustc not being found,
you likely need to upgrade your version of R.
If you want to build from source, this package contains compiled extendr Rust code to efficiently read
GTFS-realtime. You will need a Rust development environment; you can
build the Rust code by running rextendr::document().
GTFS-realtime feeds come in three flavors: vehicle positions, trip
updates, and service alerts. This package exposes three functions, one
for each type of file: read_gtfsrt_positions(),
read_gtfsrt_trip_updates(),
and read_gtfsrt_alerts().
We also have vignettes of working with each type of file: vehicle
positions, trip
updates, and service
alerts.
For most analytical applications of GTFS-realtime, you will want to
work with archived data. GTFS-realtime feeds can be quite large, so the
package supports reading feeds compressed with ZIP, gzip,
or bzip2 (anecdotally, bzip2 seems to provide
slightly better compression than gzip). For zip files, it
is also possible to have multiple GTFS-realtime feeds in a single file;
in this case, the functions above will read all of the files in the ZIP
file. You can differentiate records from different files with the
file_index column. We also have an
article demonstrating working with a day of archived data.
GTFS-realtime is a hierarchical format, and R data frames are flat
tables. Thus, a single trip update or alert will become multiple rows in
the output, with a common id. See the individual function
documentation for details.
Development versions of the package are available from mattwigway.r-universe.dev. To install the latest development version, run:
install.packages('gtfsrealtime', repos = c('https://mattwigway.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))If you want to make contributions to the package, you’ll need to
build from source. This package contains compiled extendr Rust code to efficiently read
GTFS-realtime. You will need a Rust development environment; you can
build the Rust code by running rextendr::document(). You
will also need to install protoc if you
are working with the Git source (the .tar.gz source builds
from CRAN compile the protobuf files as part of the package build
process, and do not require protoc).