Compare / vs. spreadsheets
Transit OS vs. the spreadsheet
If one person maintains your schedule, that person is not leaving soon, and your service rarely changes — the spreadsheet is a defensible choice and you should keep it. The case for changing is succession and drift, not sophistication.
Where spreadsheets genuinely wins
- It costs nothing, and for an agency counting hundreds of dollars that is not a small thing.
- Everyone already knows how to use it. There is no training, no rollout, no adoption risk.
- It works offline, on any machine, with no account and no vendor.
- It bends to any process you have, including the strange ones that are strange for good reasons.
- Nobody can take it away from you, raise its price, or discontinue it.
Where we win
- There is exactly one copy of the schedule, and everyone is looking at it.
- Every change is recorded — who, when, and what it was before.
- The schedule knows the equipment is out for inspection, so it will not assign it.
- Your GTFS feed is generated from the schedule, so the two cannot drift apart.
- Somebody other than the author can run a service change.
| spreadsheets | Transit OS | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | From $149/month |
| Training needed | None | An afternoon, then guided flows |
| Single source of truth | No — it forks the moment it is emailed | Yes |
| Change history | None. The old value is gone | Full, with author and timestamp |
| Knows about maintenance | No — different file, different person | Yes — out-of-service blocks scheduling |
| GTFS feed | A separate manual export | Generated from the same schedule |
| Works offline | Yes | No — needs a connection |
| Survives the author leaving | Rarely | Yes, that is much of the point |
| Bends to an unusual process | Completely | Within limits we will tell you honestly |
We want to be careful here, because the spreadsheet gets sneered at by people selling software, and the sneering is unearned. Agencies use spreadsheets because commercial scheduling packages carry annual minimums tied to fleet size that price out anyone under roughly ten vehicles. Given that, the spreadsheet is the correct decision, not a lazy one.
So the honest question is not 'is a spreadsheet unprofessional'. It is 'what does this spreadsheet cost us that we are not counting'.
The three costs that do not appear anywhere
- Drift. The published timetable, the feed, and the dispatcher's working copy diverge over a year, and no one event causes it.
- Reconstruction. Every question from a board or a funder becomes an archaeology project, priced in staff evenings.
- Succession. The day the author leaves, the agency loses an institution rather than a file. This one is not recoverable by working harder.
A fair test: could somebody else at your agency run the next service change from the spreadsheet, alone, without calling anyone? If yes, keep it — genuinely. If no, that is the cost, and it is denominated in risk rather than dollars.
Questions
Can we import our spreadsheet?
Usually yes, and the import is not the interesting part. What matters is the conversation the import forces, where you discover the rules that were only ever encoded in a formula.
Can we keep the spreadsheet as a backup?
Please do. Export whenever you like, in an open format, without asking us. If our export were ever hard to get, you should leave.