Organization accounts
Admin and editor roles.
Pathways Studio
A wheelchair user should not have to leave an hour early just to be sure.
Pathways Studio helps transit agencies publish accurate GTFS Pathways data: the open standard that makes step-free routes, station entrances, and realistic transfer times visible inside Google Maps, the Transit app, and other planners riders already trust.
Today
What riders see today, without it
A wheelchair user maps a trip to a 9 a.m. medical appointment. The trip planner shows a three-minute transfer. The actual transfer is eleven minutes: a long concourse, two elevators, and a level change the planner has never known about. She leaves twenty minutes early, every time, because the information she needs has never been in the feed.
Multiply that across every wheelchair user, blind or low-vision rider, older adult, parent with a stroller, and visitor in your service area. The information they need exists. It just isn’t published.
With Pathways
What changes when you publish Pathways
The same rider opens the same app. The route now uses the C Street entrance, not the main one, because C Street has an elevator and the route the app suggested before did not. The transfer reads eleven minutes. The walking directions name the entrances and signs she’ll see overhead. She arrives on time.
Disabled riders are not the only ones who benefit:
- Transfer estimates stop being generic five-minute guesses.
- Wayfinding directions use the same entrance names the signs use.
- Visitors with luggage find escalators before stairs.
- Riders running late see the closer entrance.
These benefits arrive as soon as your feed is published. Google Maps, the Transit app, and other planners that consume GTFS Pathways pick the data up automatically.
The historic blocker
Why most agencies haven’t done this yet
Modeling a station traditionally means weeks of in-station surveys, spreadsheets of pathway IDs, brittle naming conventions, and validation cycles that surface errors long after they’re easy to fix. For a system with dozens of stations, the project never starts.
Some of the largest transit systems in North America invested significant resources in manually building Pathways data. We worked on some of those projects, and learned which parts of that work are worth automating and which still require human judgment. Pathways Studio is what we built from that: a faster way to model station pathways accurately.
The Workflow
A floorplan-first workflow
Use the drawings you already have. Upload a station floorplan, align it to the real-world map, and calibrate its scale with a single known measurement. Every stop you place on the diagram gets latitude and longitude automatically.
- Place entrances, platforms, boarding areas, and connector nodes on the floorplan.
- Draw pathways between them. Same-level lengths come from the calibrated scale.
- Add mode, direction, traversal time, stair count, slope, width, and the signage text riders will see in their app.
- Model elevators, escalators, stairs, and ramps as first-class pathways. Use parallel pathways for stairs-or-elevator choices.
- Run station reports that surface isolated nodes, missing accessible routes, orphaned platforms, and pathway fields you forgot to fill in. The same report becomes the punch list for your next field visit.
Field visits don’t disappear. They change shape. Your team walks the station to confirm signs, elevator behavior, gate operations, widths, and the things a drawing can’t tell you, then goes home. The hours you used to spend documenting in the station are the hours the floorplan workflow gives back.
For data teams
Built for how data teams actually ship
GTFS feed import
Start from what you already maintain.
Conflict-safe updates
When the base feed changes, careful station modeling isn't lost the next time the schedule is republished.
MobilityData GTFS Validator
A one-click quality gate.
OpenTripPlanner reachability tests
Confirm an accessible route from a nearby origin to a platform actually routes, before you publish.
Full GTFS export or pathways-only package
Fit your existing publishing process.
Why now
Pathways is no longer experimental.
Some of the largest and most rider-centric agencies have shipped it. Google Maps and the Transit app consume it. State data guidelines increasingly expect it. For an accessibility coordinator who has been asked, year after year, when the agency will publish Pathways data, the answer can stop being “not yet.”
There is a CFO argument as well. Some riders who currently depend on paratransit would choose fixed-route if they could trust the accessibility information in their trip planner. Right now, they can’t, not because the infrastructure isn’t there, but because the data describing it isn’t in the feed. Where that gap closes, demand shifts. Unit costs on paratransit run an order of magnitude higher than fixed-route; even modest modal shift moves the number.
Everything in Pathways Studio
The full capability set.
Ten capability areas, from feed import to validated export. Read the list, or jump to the one you came for.
01
Data import and feed management
- Import an existing GTFS feed from a ZIP or individual text and CSV files. Routes, trips, stops, stop times, shapes, calendars, fares, translations, levels, pathways, transfers, areas, and networks are all covered.
- File-level progress, imported record counts, and warnings on unrecognized files.
- Working versions of the feed, so changes can be reviewed before they go live.
02
Team access
- Organization-based accounts with secure login, password reset, and email confirmation.
- Invite users, resend invitations, activate or deactivate accounts.
- Administrator and editor roles.
03
Floorplan-based station modeling
- Upload a floorplan per level. Pan, zoom, and search across the diagram.
- Calibrate scale by drawing one measurement line and entering its real-world length in meters.
- Place entrances, platforms, boarding areas, generic nodes, and child stops directly on the floorplan. Drag to move them.
- Edit stop names, IDs, location type, parent station, wheelchair boarding status, platform code, and coordinates without leaving the diagram.
- Apply naming conventions to keep stop and pathway IDs consistent.
- Remove a stop from the diagram without deleting it from the feed.
04
Georeferencing
- Align a station floorplan to the real-world map.
- Derive latitude and longitude for stops placed on the floorplan automatically, so coordinates don’t have to be entered by hand.
05
Pathway editing
- Mode options: walkway, stairs, moving walkway, escalator, elevator, fare gate, and exit gate.
- One-way or bidirectional travel, with directional arrows on the diagram.
- Traversal time, length, stair count, minimum width, and maximum slope.
- Forward and reverse signage text that flows through to rider-facing apps.
- Multiple parallel pathways between the same pair of stops, for cases like stairs-or-elevator.
06
Multi-level stations
- Levels with IDs, names, and ordering.
- Cross-level pathways for elevators, escalators, stairs, and ramps as first-class objects.
- Same-level pathway lengths calculated automatically from the calibrated floorplan.
07
Station quality reports
- Inventory by stop type, pathway type, level, and directionality.
- Coordinate and GPS presence checks.
- Isolated nodes, orphaned platforms, and incorrect parent relationships.
- Entrance-to-platform, platform-to-platform, and platform-to-exit connectivity.
- Accessible and step-free route availability across the station.
- Duplicate IDs, naming convention violations, and missing pathway fields.
- Open any affected stop or pathway directly from the report, fix it, and rebuild.
08
Conflict-safe updates
- Compare uploaded levels.txt, stops.txt, and pathways.txt against the current version.
- Review additions, modifications, removals, and conflicts side-by-side.
- Approve or reject changes individually, or approve in bulk, before applying.
09
Validation and journey testing
- One-click MobilityData GTFS Validator with errors, warnings, and informational notices.
- Validation history.
- OpenTripPlanner reachability tests from nearby geocoded origins to station stops, with expected duration, distance, and wheelchair access.
- Preflight checks that catch issues likely to break OTP graph building before the test runs.
10
Export
- Full GTFS feed export, or a pathways-only package containing the key files.
- Export warnings and file inventory before you publish.
Start small
Start with one station
Pick a busy transfer station. Model it, validate it, publish it. Watch it appear in the apps your riders already use.