TransitLens Quick Start Guide

This guide walks you through TransitLens step by step: from opening your first GTFS feed on Home to filtering the network, measuring it, using the Inspector, and keeping track of what happened along the way. The examples use the MBTA feed for Greater Boston, which anyone can open from Home. If you're new to GTFS data, to TransitLens as a GTFS viewer, or to map-based transit exploration, start here.

Open your first GTFS feed on Home

Open TransitLens and you land on Home, the place every feed starts from. There are four ways in, all at the top of the page:

• Search or paste: type an agency or a city into the search field to find it in the public catalog, or paste a link to a GTFS .zip and press Enter.
• Catalog: browse thousands of public feeds by country and agency.
• Web link: open a feed hosted on an agency's open data portal.
• Local ZIP: open a .zip from your computer, or drop it anywhere on Home.

Want to look around first? Home keeps the MBTA sample one click away: Greater Boston's buses, subway, commuter rail and ferries, with live vehicles.

While a feed opens, its progress shows right there on Home. TransitLens reads every file in the archive, including routes, trips, stops, calendars and shapes, then takes you to the map, zoomed to the whole network. Standard feeds open in a few seconds; very large ones, like MBTA, can take a minute or two.

Every feed you open is kept in Your feeds on Home, as a card with a small map of its network, how long its timetable runs, and its size in routes, stops, trips and shapes. Open it again from there next time.

Open a feed directly from a URL

You can also skip Home entirely by using a direct link. Paste a publicly hosted GTFS feed URL below to generate a shareable link that opens it directly in TransitLens:

This is useful for sharing feeds with teammates or bookmarking datasets you work with frequently.

Find your way around the map

Once a feed is open, the map fills the screen and everything you need sits around its edges:

• The rail on the left: Home, then the views of your feed: Map, Table, Timeline and Calendar. Below them, your Snapshots and Bookmarks, Feed Health for data quality checks, and Insights for reports.
• The map toolbar, top left: Layers (what the map draws), Filters (which part of the network it shows), Shapes (draw and import your own areas, lines and notes) and Measure. Each opens in the same card just below the toolbar.
• View controls, bottom right: the zoom buttons and the base map picker.
• Activity, bottom left: what is on the map and anything that needs your attention (see Keep track with Activity).

To move around: drag to pan, scroll or use + and - to zoom, double-click to zoom in, and hold Shift while dragging to zoom straight to an area. As you zoom in, individual stops appear and route lines gain detail; zoom out to see how the network covers its service area.

Explore routes and stops

TransitLens gives you several ways to find what's in the feed:

• Search: the search field at the top finds routes and stops by number or name, and places and addresses on the map. Try "Red Line" on MBTA.
• Click a route on the map: the route highlights and its card opens with its name, mode and how much it runs today. Choose "View in Inspector" to study it in depth.
• Click a stop: see which routes serve it, open the stop in the Inspector, or pick one of its routes.

Use the Inspector

The Inspector is one of TransitLens's most powerful features. It gives a structured view of how a route or a stop actually operates, well beyond what the map shows.

How to use the Inspector

1. Select a route: click it on the map or find it with the search
2. Open the Inspector: choose "View in Inspector" on the route's card
3. Explore the details: its directions, trip patterns and stop sequences, today's service and the week ahead

The Inspector answers questions like: How many patterns does the Red Line run, with its Ashmont and Braintree branches? Which stops does each pattern serve? How does service change through the week? Its Structure tab shows the Red Line as a branching route and lists each pattern with its share of the trips. When a trip is running, the stops tray above the map follows it stop by stop, with live tracking when the feed has realtime. From the Inspector you can also open the route in the Timeline or the tables.

Understand routes, directions, and patterns

GTFS data has a specific hierarchy that TransitLens makes visible:

• Route: a named transit service, such as MBTA Route 1 (Harvard Square to Nubian Station). Defined in routes.txt.
• Direction: most routes run in two directions, each with its own set of trips.
• Pattern: a unique sequence of stops within a direction. One direction can have several: the Red Line southbound splits into an Ashmont pattern and a Braintree pattern, and a bus route may run short trips that turn back early.

TransitLens groups trips by direction and pattern, so you can compare service variants side by side. For a deeper look at how routes, trips and stops relate in the GTFS spec, see How to Read GTFS Data.

Use filters to analyze the network

Filters narrow the map to the part of the network you want to study. Open Filters from the map toolbar. You can filter by:

• Mode: only buses, only rail, only ferries, and so on
• Time of day: which routes run during a time window
• Service day: weekday, weekend or a holiday
• Agency: focus on one operator when a feed carries several

Practical use cases

• Rapid transit on its own: keep Subway and Tram / Light Rail to see MBTA's 8 subway and light rail routes without its 371 bus routes
• Bus coverage on its own: filter MBTA to buses to see how far the bus network reaches beyond the subway
• The morning peak: set a 7:00 to 9:00 AM window to see the network commuters actually get
• Peak vs. off-peak: compare that with a midday window to see which routes thin out or stop

Filters combine, so you can ask very specific questions, such as "all bus routes running between 6 PM and midnight on Saturdays". Clear resets them in one step.

Layers vs Filters

This distinction matters. To see what exists in an area, use layers. To look at the same data from a different angle, for example only the bus routes running from 7 to 9 AM, use filters.

Measure distances and areas

Measure, in the map toolbar, answers the distance questions planners ask every day. Choose Distance and click point to point, or Area and click around a shape; double-click or press Enter to finish. Distances follow your units in Settings.

• Station and stop spacing: measure between neighbouring stops to check spacing along a corridor, like the Red Line from Harvard to Central, or the stops along MBTA Route 1 on Massachusetts Avenue.
• The walk to transit: measure from a new development or a school to the nearest station entrance to see whether it sits within a comfortable walk.
• The size of an area: outline a neighbourhood or a service zone to know how much ground it covers.

Save a measurement to keep it on the map and in the Measure card, where you can find, rename or remove it later.

Keep track with Activity

The Activity readout in the bottom left corner tells you at a glance how many feeds are on the map, whether live data is connected, and whether anything needs your attention. Hover it for details, or click it to open the full story.

• One story per feed: each import shows its steps, how long it took, and the feed's routes, stops, trips and shapes.
• Where to go next: Zoom to feed, or Open in Tables, Timeline, Calendar or Feed Health.
• Issues: if a feed opened with missing data or an import failed, it says what happened and what to do about it.

Find, track and resolve issues with Bookmarks

Checking a feed rarely ends in one sitting. You spot something, look into it, pass it to whoever maintains the schedule, and confirm the fix in the next release. Bookmarks carry an issue through all of that, from the moment you find it to the moment it's resolved. They're saved with your free account, so they're there on any device.

1. Discover: let Feed Health find it

Open Feed Health from the rail on the left. It checks the whole feed and groups what it finds by topic. Open a topic, then a finding, and its Evidence tab lists every route, stop or trip affected, each with a Bookmark button.

In the MBTA feed, for example, Stop placement flags two Red Line stops as likely duplicates: Broadway Station - Red Line and W Broadway @ Broadway Station sit 43 ft apart and aren't modelled as platforms of the same station. Either they're the same physical stop under two names, or two genuinely separate stops that happen to sit close together, and it's worth checking which before it confuses a rider's trip planner.

You can also bookmark as you explore: from the Inspector, from a route or stop card on the map, or from any row in the Routes and Stops tables.

2. Flag it: bookmark with a note and a severity

The bookmark fills in what was found and where, and takes its severity from the finding (a Feed Health warning starts as Medium). Add a note for whoever picks it up, change the severity if you judge it differently, and attach a snapshot so anyone can reopen exactly the view you were looking at. New bookmarks start as To do.

3. Investigate: go back to exactly where it is

Every bookmark is listed on the Bookmarks page in the rail. Expand one to read its note and details, set it to Investigating while you look into it, and open it straight on the map, in the table or in the Timeline to check the data yourself.

4. Resolve: close it when the fix is published

When the agency publishes a corrected feed, open it, check the item again, and mark the bookmark Resolved. The status filters (To do, Investigating, Resolved) show at a glance what's still open and what's done, and resolved bookmarks stay as a record of what was fixed.

Work with live data (GTFS Realtime)

A static GTFS feed describes what is planned. Many agencies also publish GTFS Realtime, a companion data source that describes what is happening right now. It comes in three parts, and each one answers a different question:

• Vehicle positions: where is every active vehicle at this moment? Vehicles appear on the map and move along their routes. Click one to see its heading, its next stop, and occupancy when the agency publishes it.
• Trip updates: is service running on time? Predicted arrivals and departures replace the printed schedule, so the departure boards in the route and stop inspectors shift as trips run early or late. Cancelled trips are counted separately instead of silently disappearing.
• Service alerts: what is disrupted? Detours and disruptions arrive as readable notices, parsed down to the exact routes and stops they affect.

How live data works in TransitLens

There is nothing to configure for supported feeds. When you import a feed from the public catalog and the agency publishes GTFS Realtime, TransitLens detects the endpoints and attaches them automatically. You will know it worked when a green LIVE badge appears in the top bar, together with a live vehicle counter and an alert counter.

1. Check what is live. Click the live counter in the top bar to open the realtime status panel. It lists each connected feed and how many vehicles, trip updates, and alerts it is currently receiving. Data refreshes automatically every few seconds.
2. Watch the map. Vehicles render on their routes with headings. Click any vehicle for its details, or use its popup to jump straight into the Route Inspector for the route it is serving.
3. Read live tables and inspectors. The Routes table gains a realtime column with a live vehicle count and alert badge per route, and both inspectors show whether upcoming departures are on time.
4. Review alerts. The alert counter opens the service alerts panel, where each notice lists the affected routes and stops as chips you can follow.

Not every feed has live data. If a feed is static only, TransitLens simply shows the scheduled service, and everything else in this guide works the same way. In the catalog you can tick "Realtime data feeds only" to browse feeds that publish live data.

Common workflows

Here are practical workflows you can follow in TransitLens, using MBTA as the example:

Understand how a route operates across the day

1. Find the route with the search, for example "Red Line", or click it on the map
2. Choose "View in Inspector" to see its directions, patterns and stop sequences
3. Open it in the Timeline to see how frequency changes from early morning to late night

Find all routes serving a specific area

1. Zoom into the area of interest, for example Kendall Square
2. Click stops to see which routes serve them
3. Use the mode filter to compare bus and rail coverage there

Inspect routes or stops in the data tables

1. Choose Table in the rail on the left, or Open in Tables from Activity
2. Search for a route or stop by name or ID
3. Sort by any column, such as name, mode, agency or zone, to scan the whole dataset
4. Click any row to jump to that route or stop on the map

Compare service between weekdays and weekends

1. Set the service day filter to a weekday and note the network density and route count
2. Switch to a Saturday or a Sunday
3. Compare which routes disappear and how frequency changes across the network
4. For a report, use Service Rhythm in Insights

Get help while you work

Open the account menu in the top right corner and look under Learn: Take a tour walks you through the app on the screens themselves, and every TransitLens guide, including this one, is one click away.