Writing about this data.

Claims the data supports

• "Agency X's published schedule data expired on [date], so trip planners like Google Maps stop showing its service." Expiry is read directly from the feed.
• "N of the M feeds tracked in [state] have expired." Counts over the covered set, with the state named.
• "Agency X's feed does not say which stops are wheelchair accessible." A statement about published data, and usually a one-setting fix in the agency's software.
• "Nationally, [pct]% of tracked feeds look ready for the federal NTD GTFS requirement."

Claims it does not support

• "The worst transit agency in America." The scorecard covers the feeds it tracks, not every agency; absence means not covered, never failing, and a position on a list here is not a national rank.
• "Agency X's buses are inaccessible." The accessibility number measures whether the data is published, never whether a stop or vehicle is usable.
• "Agency X is out of compliance." Nothing here is an official determination; the readiness signals map data quality onto requirements, and the official checks belong to the agencies and their regulators.
• Grade comparisons across sizes without saying so. A 10-bus rural system and a metro network face different capacity; the per-agency pages show peer percentiles within size bands for that reason.

Story-ready data

Every number on this site is downloadable. For a local story, start with your state: the national pulse for the picture, your state's program page (linked from any agency in it) for the portfolio, and the per-state rows in the by-state API. For a citable snapshot, use a dated dataset release rather than the live site, which changes daily. Methodology, rubric weights, and the validator version are all published: how to read a scorecard and the open dataset. For the Report Year 2026 shapes.txt requirement, the explainer carries the national and per-state numbers and the claims they support.