GBFS (General Bikeshare Feed Specification)

The General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS) is an open data standard for publishing the live state of shared mobility systems, docked or dockless: bikes, scooters, mopeds and shared cars.^1,2 Mitch Vars created it in 2014 and NABSA adopted it, to standardise how bike share systems talk to trip planning apps; MobilityData has run it since 2019 and took it over formally in 2022.² By its own catalogue, systems.csv, more than 1,500 services worldwide publish GBFS feeds.²

A feed is a set of JSON files, each covering one aspect of a system.² Some describe the system, its stations, its vehicle types and its prices.^1,2,3 Others give how many vehicles and free docks each station has now, and where free-floating vehicles are and how charged they are.^1,2 Further files carry alerts and the zones where riding or parking is restricted.^2,3 Version 3.0 has 12 such files, some always required and some only in certain cases, and a manifest file lists where each of a publisher's datasets can be found.² Static and live information sit in separate files.² The live files should never be more than five minutes out of date, and every file carries a time-to-live, the number of seconds before it will be updated again; the makers advise refreshing station and vehicle status at least every 30 seconds.^2,3 Requiring a login to read a feed does not comply with the specification, and every system must be listed in systems.csv to comply.² Version 3.0 is current and 3.1 is a release candidate.⁴

The specification recommends an open data licence for every feed, named in system_information.json by an SPDX identifier or a link to custom terms; a feed that names neither is under the Creative Commons public domain dedication (CC0).³ The specification's own repository is licensed CC BY 3.0 Unported.⁵ Feeds can be found in systems.csv and in MobilityData's Mobility Database, which catalogues GBFS feeds alongside GTFS ones.^2,6

For a model of a place, a GBFS feed says where shared bikes and docks are and how full each station is when it is read.^2,3 It holds only the current state, so a record of how stations fill and empty over a day has to be built by reading it again and again.²