A couple of days ago, I contributed the first nz.json to the transitous project (PR link), which introducest the first couple of NZ-based transport feeds. This PR contains four feeds from three different providers.

Auckland Transport feeds were the easiest to plug in, and worked without any error. As I live in Auckland I naturally tried these first. After them I started looking at all the feeds under New Zealand in the Transitland Atlas, and I was quite disappointed with the results.

Firstly, Intercity, which operates multiple bus lines around the country, as well as the InterIslander Ferries, does not seem to support GTFS feeds any longer, which is a big blow to the availability of a project like Transitous.

Secondly, Metro Christchurch, which does have a GTFS feeds available, is only available with a developer API key, which, as far as I know, cannot be passed through via transitous.

Luckily, the Wellington Uzabus has GTFS feeds available, although the main Wellington public transport network, Metlink, does not have any GTFS feeds listed on their website.

Finally, the Otago Regional Council’s bus service does have GTFS available to the public, so they were nice and easy to plug in.

In the future I may reach out to these agencies, to see if they would be interested in possibly supporting either publicly-available GTFS feeds, or a MOTIS server, or anything of the sort.

I really like the idea behind transitous, as public transport should be public and free, so hopefully adding New Zealand to transitous is a good first step in getting a small country supported by FOSS public transport programs.