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 analy-sis. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze GTFS data with a moving object database."