Transit data quality & open standards
Riders can only trust an app as much as the data behind it. I build and operate public services that score and validate the open data transit runs on: GTFS, GTFS Realtime, and the Transit Operational Data Standard.
What do you actually run?
GTFS Scorecard is a live service at gtfsscorecard.org scoring a curated registry of more than 2,100 feed records on a daily schedule, publishing its evidence alongside a read API, a GitHub Marketplace Action, and a read-only MCP server. tods-validate is a published validator for the Transit Operational Data Standard on PyPI, shipping a CLI, container, GitHub Action, and browser playground. Both are open source, and both carry explicit maturity labels instead of implied guarantees.
How do you score a feed honestly?
The scorecard prioritizes rider-facing problems over validator noise, scores realtime quality only when a usable realtime feed is actually configured, and treats a feed that cannot be fetched differently from one that fetches and fails validation. A feed record is not always a distinct agency, and the public status page reports exact current counts with the latest completed run, so the published totals never outrun the evidence.
What does standards conformance mean in practice?
Checked against the specification, not against opinion. The validators are deterministic, and findings cite the requirement they violate, so an agency or vendor can argue with the spec rather than with me. That discipline came from doing the work: interoperability modeling for a state's credential data and daily operation of feed scoring taught me where specifications are precise and where real feeds force judgment calls.
Have you built transportation systems inside government?
At the California Public Utilities Commission I directed the statewide Transportation Carrier Portal to its June 2021 launch, the system charter-party passenger carriers use for operating permits and equipment records. Working inside a regulator shapes how I read agency constraints: procurement, compliance, and operational reality are part of the design space, not obstacles to it.
Can you work with my agency or team?
Small and rural agencies are exactly who this tooling is built for: teams that publish rider-facing data without a dedicated data-quality staff. Both tools are open source, their findings are reproducible, and the methodology is documented. If a score or a validation report surfaces something in your feed you want help understanding, get in touch.