Description: Creates a general transit feed used by Google Transit.
Background: Google has developed the General Transit Feed Specification which allows transportation providers to make their routes and schedules available in the glorious format of Google Transit/Google Maps. This is free for the providers other than the work it takes to get their data into the GTFS format and host it for Google to consume. Fantastic opportunity for transportation, especially if your transportation organization has staff that can create the feed and manage it. But what about small and medium sized providers that may not have a large IT staff or may not even have their own dedicated IT staff?
I am currently working with CR Transit in Cedar Rapids, IA and they fall into the small transportation provider category. They don't have the budge to hire someone to work on this, but if they can just get to a point where they can easily create the files necessary for the feed, they can manage changes to data without needing to hire someone or have a dedicated employee. That is where GTFSimple comes in. This tool is meant to help these small and medium sized transportation providers by importing their transit data from various formats and output the resulting feed file.