03: Adding a location‐based dynamic departures sensor

Overview

GTFS2 allows you to create an HA sensor entity that dynamically shows transit departures in your vicinity, dynamically updating available departures as you move around. The purpose is to help you find transport based on your geographical position.

Requirements

To use this feature, you must have your Home Assistant configured with a entity that has positional data (i.e. latitude, longitude). That entity can be a Person (e.g. person.xyz) or a Zone (e.g. zone.xyz). A Person with positional data is usually acquired though a mobile phone and the HA companion app, but other methods exist.

Search radius

The default radius searched is 300m. You can configure the search radius to shrink or grow the area searched.

Note

For performance impact prevention, there is a limit of 15 stops returned in the searched range. If you bump into this limit then you should reduce the radius.

Creating the dynamic sensor

Select "Scheduled departure on stops in your vicinity"

In the Main Menu:

Select a data source, positional entity, and name

1. Select the GTFS data source to be searched for nearby departures.
2. Select a positional entity. The dropdown will only offer entities of type 'person' or 'zone'
3. Choose a name for the sensor. It's good practice to choose a name that combines entity and source (e.g. Foo Nederland in the screenshot), especially when you are using multiple sources or when multiple people use the same source.

Note

These sensors can only collect data from stops existing in the chosen source. If your area is served by multiple providers, each with their own GTFS data source, then you need to add a sensor for each one of them.

Success

The sensor is created.

Note

Depending on where the person or zone is located at the time your are setting this sensor up, the number of stops shown with future departures could very well be 0.

Available sensors

It will create sensors per stop containing the next departures, for example:

Local stop fields explained

Field	Description
departure: '08:30'	scheduled departure time in local stop timezone
departure_datetime: '2024-11-04T07:30:00+00:00'	scheduled departure time in local stop timezone, as utc
departure_realtime: '08:27'	estimated departure real-time, received from the data-source/provider, in local stop timezone
departure_realtime_datetime: '2024-11-04T07:27:46+00:00'	estimated departure real-time, received from the data-source/provider, in local stop timezone, as utc
delay_realtime_derived: '-0:02:14'	estimated delay, derived from departure time and real-time, shows '-' if 0 or non-existing real-time. Can be negative if departure is estimated before the scheduled time.
delay_realtime: '-'	delay, received from the data-source/provider, shows '-' if 0 or non-existing
date: '2024-11-04'	date related to the scheduled data
stop_name: My City Centre	name of the stop for which the data is shown
route: B	route for which the data is shown
route_long: My City Center - via Town XYZ - End Station	long name of the route for which the data is shown
headsign: End Station	headsign of the vehicle for which the data is shown
trip_id: '1907425342153'	?
direction_id: 1	?
icon: mdi:bus	?