Does your GTFS feed need shapes.txt?

What shapes.txt is

shapes.txt is the file in a GTFS feed that traces each trip's path along the street or rail line, point by point. Trip planners use it to draw your routes on the map. A feed without it still lists stops and times, but an app can only connect the stops with straight lines, so the map shows vehicles cutting across blocks they never travel.

Each row in trips.txt points at a path through its shape_id column. Full coverage means every trip carries a shape_id that matches a path in shapes.txt.

Who needs it, and when

FTA's July 2025 final rule added shapes.txt to the GTFS that NTD reporters with fixed-route or deviated-fixed-route service publish and certify each year on the D-10 form. The requirement phases in by reporter type:

Report Year 2026 is the step that reaches most small agencies, many of them publishing GTFS under the NTD requirement for the first time. An agency that cannot comply yet can request a one-year waiver by showing it is pursuing technical assistance to establish its GTFS data. Your reporter type and any waiver live in your own NTD filing, not on this site.

Source: FTA's NTD reporting changes for report years 2025 and 2026. Reporters with no fixed-route or deviated-fixed-route service are outside the GTFS requirement.

Check whether your feed has it

The shapes.txt check already runs on every US feed this site tracks: open your agency's scorecard page and look for “shapes.txt covers your trips” in the NTD GTFS readiness section. If your agency is not tracked here, paste your feed's URL to grade it in about a minute, or run the pre-publish check on an export you have not published yet; that one reads the zip in your browser and uploads nothing.

How to add it

Shape data usually comes from the software that builds your feed, not from hand-drawn maps. If a vendor or scheduling tool produces your GTFS export, ask for shapes.txt in the export, with trips.shape_id set to match. If some trips already have shapes, the remaining work is to fill in the rest so every trip has a path.

After you republish, the next completed scoring run re-checks your feed and the readiness line on your agency's page updates on its own.

Where tracked feeds stand

Across the 978 US feeds this site tracks and checks, 87.9% carry a shape for every trip. The rest have the file to add or finish before their report year.

By state

For reporters: the Report Year 2026 story

The story here is population-level: a federal data requirement reaches the smallest transit agencies in Report Year 2026, and a measurable share of published feeds do not carry the file yet. When FTA finalized the rule in July 2025, it estimated that just over a third of reporters already provided shapes.txt.

“Of 978 tracked US transit feeds checked, 87.9% include a shape for every trip.” The per-state counts above support a local cut, counted over the covered set with the state named. The same numbers are machine-readable in ntd.json.

Two claims these numbers do not support. First, “Agency X is out of compliance”: reporter type and waiver status live in an agency's own NTD filing, and this site reads published feeds, not filings; it states what a feed contains and certifies nothing. Second, a worst-agencies ranking: the site covers the feeds it tracks, so absence means not covered, never failing, and these denominators differ from FTA's (tracked feeds, not all NTD reporters). Attribution and more guidance: writing about this data.