Reconstructing a GTFS-Flex Feed from Public Documents: Demand Responsive Transport in Fuso Town, Aichi, Japan
Year: 2026
Type: software
Abstract: Fuso Town (Aichi Prefecture, Japan) operates a demand-responsive transport service, Choisoko Fuso, for which no GTFS feed is published. This record contains a GTFS-Flex feed for that service, reconstructed entirely from publicly available materials — the town's web pages and its stop-location map — together with the R scripts that produced it and a Shiny application that searches trips between two stops. Note (added after publication). This version of the feed covers the 93 public-facility and business boarding points. The residential points are recovered by the deposited scripts, which process all 150 published entries, but are held back from the feed itself pending a zone-based representation. Four boarding points — Sogo Gymnasium, Fuso Station West, Fuso Station East, and Konan Kosei Hospital — were placed by hand, since the published materials did not locate them unambiguously. The README deposited with this version states three; the correct number is four. Both points will be reflected in the files at version 1.1. The feed passes the Canonical GTFS Schedule Validator 8.0.1 with no errors. It contains 93 stops and is recognized as fixed-stops demand-responsive transit. The validator output is deposited unmodified, in both JSON and HTML form, so that the result can be inspected without re-running the validator. Stop coordinates are recovered from the label positions on the stop-location map PDF, which are vector text and therefore carry a page position for each stop number. Because the map spreads clustered labels apart, each map-derived position is compared with a geocoded position for the same stop, and the geocoded one is preferred where the two agree within 150 m. Coordinates read off the map by hand take precedence over both, and are deposited so that the procedure can be reproduced. This feed was created independently by the author from published information. It is offered as a demonstration that a demand-responsive service can be represented in GTFS-Flex from public sources alone, and as a template for carrying out the same procedure for other municipalities. It covers the service pattern and the full stop network; fares and the membership requirement are outside its scope. Feeds of this kind are ordinarily published by operators, and reconstructions by a third party from public materials appear to be uncommon. Inquiries about this feed should be directed to the author of this repository. Inquiries about the service itself should be directed to the town. Running the application. The application reads the feed and returns an estimated departure and arrival window for a chosen pair of stops, together with the road route. gtfsflex_app.zip contains the application with the files it reads and is the easier starting point: unzip("gtfsflex_app.zip", exdir = "gtfsflex_app") shiny::runApp("gtfsflex_app") app.R is also deposited on its own. The application requires the shiny, leaflet, dplyr, readr, httr, and jsonlite packages, and an internet connection for the OSRM routing endpoint set at the top of the script. Its interface is in Japanese. Generative AI declaration. The feed, the scripts, the application and this description were drafted and edited with Claude (Anthropic). All coordinates, the feed itself and the validation results were produced by running the code. The author has checked them and takes responsibility for the content.
Author: Moteki, Yasutoshi
Institution: Nanzan University
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7211908546