Important standards in Public Mobility

Interoperability is not a property that appears on its own. It is the result of agreeing, in public, on how systems describe timetables, vehicles, availability, bookings and payments to one another. Three families of standards do most of that work in Public Mobility today.

GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) describes scheduled public transport — routes, stops and timetables — in a form any application can read. It is the reason a journey planner can cover an entire country’s transit network without negotiating with every operator individually.

TOMP-API, developed by the Transport Operator / MaaS Provider working group, standardises the transaction between a mobility operator and the service that resells its trips: what is available, how it is booked, how the trip is reported and settled.

The Beckn protocol goes a step further. Rather than standardising one interface, it describes how a decentralised network of providers and consumer-facing applications can discover one another and transact directly, without a platform sitting in the middle. FINOMAD promotes its application, use, training and further development for mobility purposes.

Each answers a different question. Read together, they describe the plumbing that an open mobility ecosystem needs.