For rural, tribal and small transit agencies
If your agency reports fixed-route service to the National Transit Database, FTA requires a public GTFS feed — and beginning with Report Year 2026, the smallest reporters must include route geometry (shapes.txt) in it. Here is what that actually means, what it does not mean, and your options for getting it done.
Agencies reporting any fixed-route mode to the NTD — including deviated fixed route, and including Reduced, Rural and Tribal reporters — must maintain a static GTFS dataset at a public URL, no password, and submit that URL with their NTD report. This has applied since Report Year 2023 and is certified on the CEO's D-10 form.
FTA's July 2025 reporting changes make shapes.txt — the file that draws each route's actual path on a map — a required part of the submitted feed. It took effect in Report Year 2025 for full reporters, and takes effect in Report Year 2026 for reduced, rural and tribal reporters. The same notice requires the feed's agency ID fields to match your NTD ID from RY2025.
GTFS-Realtime — live vehicle positions — is not an NTD requirement. FTA said so explicitly when it declined to mandate GTFS extensions. The compliance obligation is the static schedule feed. Realtime is what your riders want; the static feed is what the regulation asks for. Those are different things, and this page won't pretend otherwise.
Sources, so you can read them yourself: FTA's NTD reporting-changes notices of March 3, 2023 and July 10, 2025, both in the Federal Register, and FTA's NTD program pages. Verify anything here against the current guidance before you rely on it — reporting rules change, and your NTD analyst has the final word for your agency.
Plenty of agencies author their own GTFS. Free tools exist — National RTAP's GTFS Builder was made for exactly this, and it costs nothing. If someone on your staff has the time to build the feed, validate it, host it, and keep it current as your service changes, that is a perfectly good answer and you can stop reading here.
Miles is for the agency that would rather not become a GTFS shop. We author the feed from your timetable, validate it, host it, keep it current, and handle the Google Maps and Transit app submissions — either as part of the full tracking service, or on its own.
Feed only, no hardware
$1,200
one-time build, then $99/month hosted, maintained and re-published as your service changes (6 routes included, $150/route beyond). Have AVL already? We relay your existing GTFS-Realtime alongside it for $179/month total.
See the feed-only offerOnce accurate GTFS exists, your schedule shows up where riders already look. The next step — the one riders actually feel — is live positions: the bus on a map on your own website. That is the full Miles service: the rider map, the embed, both feeds authored and maintained, and positions from driver phones, the GPS you already run, or trackers we loan you — priced per vehicle per month with no long-term contract.
Sixty days free, installed — and your GTFS handled either way.
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