The ZOU! intercity bus network: seamlessly bilingual open data feeds

ZOU! is the brand used by the French Region Sud Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur to organise and manage its public transport offer. It encompasses intercity rail services, school buses, intercity buses, etc. The intercity bus network connects the main cities of the Region and Points of interest (airport and high-speed train station).

Open data feeds

As of today, the open data feeds for the ZOU! intercity bus network can be found on the French National Access Point (NAP) in both GTFS and NeTEx. Both datasets are listed on the same page.

Both datasets are updated daily.

Technical highlights

For the NeTEx feeds, the technical highlights are:

• 100% compliance to what is expected by the French NAP (0 error or warning in the online validation report)
• A very light archive (633 KB)
• A .ZIP archive that contains
  • 4 files that are common to the entire dataset (resource, network, stop, fare),
  • 21 files that each describe the offer of a line.

For the GTFS feeds, the technical highlights are:

• Almost 100% compliance to what is expected by the French NAP (only 22 warnings in the online validation report)
• A light archive (1.91 MB)
• A .ZIP archive that contains
  • 7 required files (agency, stops, routes, trips, stop_times, calendar, calendar_dates),
  • 3 optional files (attributions, shapes, feed_info).

To learn more, data consumers can explore additional information made available on the French NAP.

Learnings for other networks

Exploring both resources from ZOU!, there is clear evidence that:

• Datasets are updated and made publicly available at the same time,
• Data is consistent between the GTFS and NeTEx feeds.

It demonstrates that the most important is to focus on enriching its data and that the standards matter very little for data exposure. So, if anything, ZOU! intercity network showcases that it is possible to be seamlessly bilingual in both NeTEx and GTFS: all you need is the right tool to make it happen.