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gps2gtfs

Website: https://e-kotov.github.io/gps2gtfs/

gps2gtfs turns raw GPS pings from public transit vehicles into GTFS-shaped trips and stop_times tables. It cleans the pings, cuts each vehicle’s trajectory into trips between terminals (or at layovers, or by a trip annotation that the pings already carry), detects stop visits with arrival, departure and dwell times, and traces the geometry each trip actually drove. It is a high-performance R port of the Python gps2gtfs package.

Where it fits 

GTFS-RT Vehicle Positions ──(gtfsrealtime)──┐
                                            ├─► gps2gtfs ─► trips, stop_times, shapes
raw AVL / logger GPS ───────────────────────┘                     │
                                                                  ▼
                                   gtfsrt2static ─► realized GTFS zip ─► gtfsio / gtfstools / tidytransit
  • gtfsrealtime parses GTFS-Realtime protobuf. Its Vehicle Positions output uses the column names gps2gtfs expects (vehicle_id, latitude, longitude, timestamp, speed), so it feeds the pipeline with no adapter.
  • This package does the spatial inference: trips, stop visits and driven shapes from coordinates.
  • gtfsrt2static assembles the result into a standard-compliant static GTFS feed, either inheriting the identifiers of a planned feed or scaffolding one from scratch.

Installation 

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("e-kotov/gps2gtfs")

A Rust toolchain is optional. When cargo and rustc are found at install time, the heavy steps are compiled in Rust; otherwise a C++ (Rcpp) backend is built. backend = "auto" prefers Rust, then Rcpp, then a pure R implementation that uses data.table and sf. All three return identical tables.

Example

The package ships one day of GPS pings from a bus on route 654 between Kandy and Digana, Sri Lanka, with the route’s stops and its two terminals:

library(gps2gtfs)

result <- g2g_extract_trips_and_stop_times(
  gps_data = g2g_data_gps,
  terminals_data = g2g_data_terminals,
  stops_data = g2g_data_stops,
  terminals_buffer_radius = 50,
  stops_buffer_radius = 30,
  stops_extended_buffer_radius = 50,
  # each stop-direction label maps to the terminal its trips start from
  stop_direction_map = c("Kandy-Digana" = "BT01", "Digana-Kandy" = "BT02"),
  return_trajectory = TRUE
)

result$trips          # one row per trip: terminals, direction, start/end time
result$stop_times     # one row per stop visit: arrival, departure, dwell
g2g_diagnostics(result)                       # what was kept and dropped, by stage
shapes <- g2g_shapes_from_trips(result$trajectory)  # shapes.txt-shaped table

All times are absolute POSIXct values, never clock strings, so a trip that runs past midnight stays unambiguous.

Learn more

Credits

gps2gtfs ports the method and the example data of the Python gps2gtfs package by Aaivu. The method is described in Ratneswaran et al. (2023, doi:10.1109/ICCT56969.2023.10075789) and the software in Ratneswaran et al. (2025, doi:10.1016/j.simpa.2025.100780).

License

MIT © Egor Kotov, Aaivu