Might Google in the future add a GTFS-RT with persistent gRPC streaming ?

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Shashank

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Sep 4, 2025, 3:41:45 PM (2 days ago)  Sep 4
to GTFS-realtime
Hello community, 

I was wondering if Google is thinking of implementing the streaming or ingest of gRPC based GTFS-RT data. Right now it is proto files at certain intervals. 
gRPC eliminates the proto files effectively eliminating file structure and Redis can come into picture on the server side(Like a transport agency being a source)

What are your thoughts on this ?? 


Andrew Byrd

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Sep 5, 2025, 8:47:47 AM (18 hours ago)  Sep 5
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Hello,

I cannot speak for what Google is doing, but among GTFS producers and consumers it has been common to distribute GTFS-RT messages incrementally/differentially via message queue systems for over a decade. The technologies in use may not be the ones you mention, but the principle of sending small messages with low latency rather than repeatedly fetching a file is there.

This practice is not very well documented, but there is a Github issue about updating the spec where I have collected some examples of GTFS-RT producers using this approach and some characteristics of their systems:

Regards,
Andrew
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