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Roundup · Feeds & Standards

November 2026 roundup: the 2025 NTD data lands, fare gates spread, and GTFS-Realtime picks a side

What moved on the transit data layer from early October to early November 2026: the 2025 NTD products and a 1,207-agency GTFS link list, FTA reading TAM data against grant applications, fare gates and open-loop capping, and a GTFS-Realtime rule on who is wrong when an alert and a trip update disagree.

By
Nick Sawinyh
Filed

What changed on the data and technology layer of transit between the start of October and the first week of November 2026, for the people who produce the feeds, file the reports and run the systems. Vote tallies are as of 16:36 UTC on November 6.

Dates to act on

What Who can act Closes (UTC)
GTFS-Realtime NewRoutes vote, routes that exist only in the real-time feed Producers and consumers, comment on PR 621 Nov 9
Comments on FTA’s proposed Capital Investment Grants guidance, including how it will verify TAM progress from NTD data Any CIG sponsor or NTD reporter, docket FTA-2026-0331 Nov 16
GTFS licenses.txt vote to adopt Producers and consumers, comment on the PR Nov 19, 23:59:59
GTFS Notices vote to adopt Producers and consumers; one producer vote still needed Nov 19, 23:59

If you build on National Transit Database products, report year 2025 is on the shelf. The agency-level 2025 annual datasets on data.transportation.gov mostly carry a data date of October 5, a few as early as late August, the multi-year 2022 to 2025 views were refreshed on October 14 to 16, the seven data summary stories went up between October 12 and 16, and energy consumption followed on November 4, the October delivery our July roundup relayed.

The product most feed people will want got no announcement. Since report year 2023 FTA requires every fixed-route reporter to keep a public GTFS feed, and the GTFS weblinks dataset that collects those links, last loaded on November 5, now holds 1,517 agency-and-mode rows for 1,207 agencies: 465 full reporters, 373 reduced reporters and 369 rural reporters. Rows with no link number 18, and 13 of those say the agency sent FTA a zip file instead of hosting one. Rows modified since October 1 number 89. It is the closest thing to a federal register of US feeds, and it is organised by NTD ID, which is the join key the Mobility Database lacks. How the NTD fits together is in our NTD explainer.

FTA proposes to read your TAM data against your CIG application

Agencies with a Capital Investment Grants project will have their National Transit Database submissions checked against their Transit Asset Management plan. The proposed CIG policy guidance published October 1 answers a December 17, 2025 Inspector General audit, which found FTA was not verifying that applicants had made progress on their TAM targets. FTA now proposes to compare a sponsor’s NTD data and narrative with its TAM plan and State of Good Repair targets, and to add TAM review to the project management oversight applied to every CIG project. In exchange it drops the signed Accountable Executive statement at entry to Engineering, keeping it for the construction grant request, while still requiring the current TAM plan and the most recent NTD submission at both stages. Comments close November 16, and the final guidance takes effect the day it is posted.

The MTA’s gate pilot cut fare evasion 35 percent, and 150 stations are funded

Governor Hochul’s office reported on October 7 that the 20 subway stations fitted with modern fare gates saw evasion fall by an average of 35 percent, with 72 percent drops at Hoyt Street and Nostrand Avenue. The MTA qualified Cubic, STraffic and Conduent to bid on the next 20 stations, with bids due in October and installation starting in the fourth quarter, and the 2025 to 2029 capital plan commits $1.1 billion to fare control areas at 150 stations. The pilot gates were supplied at no cost to the MTA, and the 35 percent rests on the agency’s own gate counts.

Account-based ticketing with regional capping reaches mid-size agencies

Enghouse Transportation announced on October 14 that seven Ventura County operators now share one open-loop program on the Cal-ITP framework, with regional capping, so a rider who transfers between operators is charged as if they were one system. Duluth Transit Authority launched account-based ticketing and open payments together on October 19, with caps of $3 a day and $40 a month that apply the same whether the rider taps a bank card, the app or the new smartcard, and Saskatoon Transit followed on October 21 with smart cards and a fare-inspection app. Once a cap spans operators, the fare rules live in a shared account system rather than on each agency’s bus, which is the shift our tap-to-pay explainer describes.

Bus-mounted enforcement cameras: Boston started, Los Angeles and Chicago expand

The MBTA’s automated bus lane and bus stop enforcement program launched October 1 on Hayden AI cameras and is in a warnings phase, under a state law passed in 2025. Mass Transit reported on November 5 that LADOT’s DASH buses are getting windshield cameras, with warnings first and tickets from January 2, 2027, and that Chicago’s council made its Smart Streets program permanent and citywide, with 46 more CTA buses to be equipped. The data product is a geotagged, timestamped violation record generated by the bus itself, which is the same AVL-plus-camera pattern we described in our AI in transit explainer.

If you publish GTFS-Realtime, an alert that contradicts your trip updates is now your bug

A rule merged into the GTFS-Realtime specification on November 5 settles who is wrong when a service alert and a trip update disagree: the producer. Trip updates must reflect what is happening on the network, and alerts must not contradict them. The text names three conflicts to fix: a stop-closure alert while the stop is not SKIPPED in trip updates, a route-closure alert while its trips are not CANCELED, and a route closed all day whose trip updates cancel only the next ninety minutes. Consumers must use both feeds to make routing decisions, and may route on an alert alone only when its effect is NO_SERVICE, so producers are told to scope such alerts to the smallest entity that is actually closed. Every Cause and Effect value also gained a definition, which gives station signs and validators that read those codes, the path in our passenger information explainer, something to check against. The October vote passed seven to nothing, after an August attempt that put the conflict on consumers failed.

The GTFS licence file is in its final vote

The licenses.txt proposal, which lets a feed declare a licence for the whole dataset or for each file, reopened its adoption vote on November 5 after a first attempt was stopped when the named second consumer turned out to be a feed editor. The producer is OpenGeo’s Dutch national feed and the consumer is the Transitous router, and OpenGeo’s comment on the thread makes the case in one feed: shapes.txt is under ODbL, two ticketing files are CC-BY-NC-ND and the rest is CC0, and until now there was nowhere in the feed to say so. The Notices proposal, short free text of up to 250 characters on a trip, a trip segment or a route, needs one more producer by November 19; OpenTripPlanner’s vote does not count because the proposal is its own. The min_transfer_time correction had its vote cancelled on November 6 so the advocate can add transfer type 5, and the optional service_id on transfers.txt closes its vote to test tonight, on track to pass. The google/transit repository, its Google contributor licence agreement and Google’s GTFS developer page were unchanged six weeks after the ownership transfer.

GBFS 3.1 is official, and the features you were waiting for moved to 3.2

MobilityData released GBFS v3.1 on November 4, backward compatible with 3.0. It adds a vehicle_availability.json endpoint for systems where a vehicle can be reserved ahead, and a rule that every endpoint should respond in under one second. Reservation pricing, operating area and country code in the manifest, a city name in station information, fare capping and a minimum age per vehicle type were carried to 3.2-RC, cut the next day, because nobody implemented them in time. A proposal filed November 6 would make operator required in system_information.json, a breaking change. Dott made 282 public feeds private on October 13, and the Mobility Database still shows a pre-3.0 feed with no licence as CC-BY-4.0, so read the licence off the feed.

Your validator notice counts will change when 9.0 ships

The canonical GTFS validator has not tagged a release since v8.0.1 on May 12, but the 9.0 release issue opened October 2 and what has merged means a feed that is clean on v8.0.1 today may not be clean on 9.0. A required file with a header row and no data draws required_file_empty as an error, where v8.0.1 passes it. A trip with more than five consecutive stop times at the same clock time draws an informational notice, and unused_station moved from informational to warning. A bug fix matters for anyone comparing counts across versions: when the headsign validator hit a circular trip it stopped checking every trip after it in the feed, so the fixed build will report headsign notices v8.0.1 never did. None of this is in our September piece on what the validator checks, which describes v8.0.1.

TIDES v2.0 renames and reshapes the tables, and an alpha is queued

If you produce TIDES data, the development branch shows what v2.0 will ask of you. passenger_events becomes device_events, keyed on a required device_id, so fare gates and handheld validators report through the same table as bus counters. Every enumeration moves to snake case, ntd_mode takes the NTD’s two-character mode codes, route_type takes GTFS numeric codes, and new crew and vehicle_crew tables let a trip carry a conductor or a mid-trip relief. A migration guide was updated November 3 and the v2.0-alpha.1 pull request was still open on November 6. MobilityData’s agreement to manage TIDES was signed October 2, and the acronym now officially expands to Transit Integrated Data Exchange Specification, not the expansion our TIDES explainer uses.

Also noted

  • Google.org gave the MIT Transit Lab $2.1 million over three years for a control-center decision tool that combines prediction, optimization and language models, Mass Transit reported on October 1.
  • Masabi opened an AI Labs incubator on October 7 with four agencies; Greater Dayton RTA is testing natural-language queries over its ridership and fare-validation data.
  • OCTA’s OC ACCESS paratransit, about 4,000 trips a day, went live on Spare’s software on October 24, per Metro Magazine’s November 5 briefs.
  • Metrolinx’s master agreement with Shift Technologies Canada, effective October 26, lets the 43 Ontario agencies in its Transit Procurement Initiative buy on-demand dispatch software, per Mass Transit on November 4.
  • HSL’s Digitransit rider interface, in its November 4 release, now shows the GTFS stop_headsign on stop pages and no longer lists drop-off-only stop times as departures, so those fields now reach riders wherever Digitransit is deployed.
  • MOTIS 2.11.4, released October 21, tracks real-time state per stop and fixes elevator updates for wheelchair routing.
  • MobilityData’s interoperability registry read 13 compliant, 10 partially compliant and 22 not compliant of 55 on November 5, against 13, 8 and 24 when we measured it in October, after the maintainers decided a governmental maintainer counts as partially compliant; no specification was re-evaluated.
  • The 2027 GTFS Roadmap and the “Seal of Reliability” announced at MobilityData’s September summit still had no page on November 6.
  • The Open Mobility Foundation announced on October 16 a safety-data initiative led by the City of Amsterdam, building an API on MDS 2.1 for bike and light-electric-vehicle crash and near-miss data, with a proof of concept targeted for the end of 2026.

On the calendar

The full list is on our events calendar.

The NTD products, the merged alert rule and the GBFS release will hold. The CIG guidance, the three votes, the TIDES alpha and the validator’s 9.0 are mid-flight.