This is a short, plain statement of what the scorecard lists, why, and how an agency can correct or remove its listing. It exists because the tool grades public agencies by name, and the people it is built for deserve to know the rules.
The scorecard checks public GTFS feeds that an agency already publishes openly, and grades the data quality. We list an agency to help it (and the people who support it) see how the feed is doing and what to fix first. The sources are public feed catalogs (the Mobility Database, transit.land) and agency-submitted feeds.
The public scorecard does not use analytics or track visitors. It sets no tracking cookies, sends no page-view beacons, and does not build rider or visitor profiles. Site-quality checks use automated synthetic visits instead of observing real visitor sessions.
The domain owner may verify ownership through DNS and submit the public sitemap to Search Console outside this project. The repository contains no Search Console credentials, API configuration, or automated submission workflow.
The grade is a data-quality and completeness lens meant to help an agency improve its feed. It is not the official Caltrans or Cal-ITP compliance determination, and it is not a verdict on the agency's service. A low grade usually means the feed is expiring or missing optional fields, not that the buses are bad. Findings are framed as fixes, never as failures, and an agency that does not publish realtime is shown neutrally, never penalized for it.
We will act on these quickly and without argument:
- Correct a name, URL, or detail that is wrong: use the
correction and claim form, open a pull
request against the
registry, or email the address in the repository. A correction only needs a public source that supports it. - Request removal: an agency that does not want to be listed can ask to be removed, by the same channels. We honor removal requests; the entry is deleted and the agency is excluded from future runs.
- Report a feed that has moved or broken: tell us and we will update or drop the URL.
Agency staff can ask to become the verified contact for a listing. Opening a request does not prove ownership or employment. A maintainer verifies one of three evidence paths before marking a contact as verified:
- confirmation on an agency-controlled public webpage;
- a one-time proof file or text at the public feed host; or
- a private reply from an official agency email domain.
Do not publish private email addresses, access tokens, or credentials in an issue. Until evidence has been reviewed, the request remains unverified. Verification confirms the contact's relationship to the listing. It does not endorse the grade, override the rubric, or prevent other people from reporting errors. Registry changes still go through a reviewed pull request so the public record shows what changed and why.
A feed whose calendar ran out over a year ago is shown in its own group on the directory, separate from the recently lapsed ones. Two cases hide in that group, and we tell them apart by hand rather than by the grade:
- The agency still runs and the export lapsed. A curator can record this with
an
operating_notein the relevant registry shard after confirming the service still operates. The scorecard and directory then show the verified note, so the feed reads as recoverable rather than defunct. - The service genuinely ended. When an agency has stopped operating, the entry is retired or retained only as a noncurrent alias, and is excluded from future catalog runs. Its current scorecard, badge, conformance files, and map are removed. Date-stamped score records may remain as historical evidence; they are not presented as the agency's current condition. We do not leave a permanent failing grade on an agency that no longer exists.
The registry is curated, so every entry can be reviewed, corrected, or removed by a person. If something here is wrong or unwelcome, that is a bug, and we want to fix it.