The wiki will be out of service periodically due to system updates that have been long overdue.

About 10 years ago, Transit Unlimited Wiki was born.

In 2008:

While the Bay Area has many transportation alternatives, it is often hard to figure out what options there are and how to use them. It can be especially confusing for new and infrequent riders and visitors on vacation or business. The goal of this project is to fill in the gaps left by the official transit web sites and online transit trip planners with the information and knowledge experienced riders have picked up along the way.

After 10 years, things have changed quite a bit.

1. Trip planning and mapping technologies have advanced. Transit schedules now have a industry standard format.
2. More transit agencies offer real time information. We support real time departure information on the wiki for agencies that offer open API access.
3. We expanded beyond the Bay Area. In 2009 we expand coverage in Sacramento and Southern California. We are covering all the way to Chicago.
4. Mobile devices are common today. We have a mobile version of the wiki.
5. Transit agencies are using social media for service alerts and announcements. We integrate and embed these information whenever available to provide a one-stop shop.
6. Complementary services like bike sharing is available in more locations.
7. Agencies and cities are testing app-enabled ride services.
8. Cities are building rail-like bus rapid transit lines with dedicated facilities.
9. Saw significant reduction on transit due to the Great Recession, and seeing recovery in service as the economy improves.

We still have a lot more work to do. Eventually I want to see the wiki to cover coast to coast, from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. Besides the major cities, there’s transit in the rural areas (intercity and dial-a-ride) throughout the country.

I believe that this is the only wiki dedicated to transit service information available today. There were attempts for wikis to provide transit information. There are also wikis today that cover transit agencies in different aspects (professional planners, fleet details). I think part of this wiki’s success is the use of the Semantic MediaWiki extension, which allows the information to be entered once on a page and then queried many times in other pages. That’s how we could provide the same level of detail for transit service on some strip mall in a city, and provide interactive maps for a bus route, a region, a city, or a county. Our strength is still our agency-independence format and coverage, as well as a human touch beyond machine readable information formats like GTFS.

One of the most popular wikis for transit information is Wikipedia. The help of enthusiastic editors can allow transit information to be available in high details. However because of Wikipedia’s broad and general mission, as well as standard for notability and 3rd party reference, such information and level of detail may not always be appreciated. I believe that Transit.wiki and Wikipedia have separate roles even covering the same transit agency, route, or infrastructure. Transit.wiki focuses on being a user guide and directory, and Wikipedia focuses on background, history, and controversies.

transit.wiki or transitunlimited.org has been up for almost 10 years highlighting transit routes and locations served by transit. Originally the wiki covered the San Francisco Bay Area agencies but it has been expanded to cover the entire western US. My hope is that it would cover the entire US someday.

One of the challenges with expansion is the need to keep to date with transit information as service changes over time. I try very hard to keep information current for major transit agencies, but there needs to be better tools to keep up.

Many transit agencies perform service changes at regular intervals up to 3 or 4 times a year. Due to federal laws and labor agreements, planners propose changes a few months ahead, conduct public hearings, perform federally mandated analyses, seek board approvals, and implement these changes at regularly scheduled driver sign-ups.

It is a lot of work, but the agencies do not present service change information the same way. Some of them put the information on a blog style web site and keep it permanently. Many put them on a single service change page where the information will be replaced for the next change. Some of them put in PDFs as part of a news release. Often times the information is hard to find once the change is implemented. You have to go to the Internet Archive to look for it.

We have good repositories for schedule and route info in GTFS format, with such sites as transitfeeds.com. You can not only find the current info but past data from years past.

While you can check and see the changes by comparing information between versions, it is not as easy as to check the service change materials. Also the service change materials often present why they are changing routes and schedules.

The wiki has expanded to become a repository for the changes. Pages can be added to the wiki to include the source material from the agency about the service changes. Once it is saved, it stays.

https://www.transit.wiki/About:AC_Transit

There’s also a calendar that highlights the past and upcoming service changes among all the agencies.

https://www.transit.wiki/Service_change_calendar

This help keeps me informed with changes that may need updates on the wiki, such as route changes, new routes, and route discontinuations.

For you, this information can provide insights of why things changed, may that be due to ridership or changes in funding.

For a while, the wiki has offered bus stop maps (and real time predictions) for agencies that uses the NextBus API (including Muni, AC Transit, LA Metro, etc) and the OneBusAway API (maps only for agencies in the Seattle Region).

Now we provide our own GTFS parsing API to offer the same bus stop map for more than 20 agencies, including UTA in Salt Lake City, RTD in Denver, Valley Metro in Phoenix, ABQ Ride, Sacramento RT, San Diego MTS, etc. Real time arrival information is available through the bus stop maps for SamTrans and VTA in the SF Bay Area.

Example: Map:MTS 30 (route that serves the beautiful La Jolla and Pacific beaches in San Diego)

Some of the systems includeing UTA and SD MTS have their own real time data. Offering that data on the site is one of the things yet to do.