Analyzing public transport in the city of Buenos Aires with MobilityDB

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a data format widely used to share data about public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS comes in two versions: GTFS Static describing the planned itineraries and GTFS Realtime describing the actual ones. MobilityDB is a novel and free open-source moving object database, developed as a PostgreSQL and PostGIS extension, that adds spatial and temporal data types along with a large number of functions, that facilitate the analysis of mobility data. Loading GTFS data into MobilityDB is a quite complex task that, nevertheless, must be done in an ad-hoc fashion. This work describes how MobilityDB is used to analyze public transport mobility in the city of Buenos Aires, using both, static and real-time GTFS data for the Buenos Aires public transportation system. Visualizations are also produced to enhance the analysis. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze GTFS data with a moving object database.