Organization Summary
Meet FivePaths, LLC.
FivePaths builds and maintains Drupal sites for public transit agencies, government, and nonprofits. We have worked in and from San Francisco for more than 20 years., Content is the most important part of any of our websites: transit schedules and service alerts, public meeting records, translated and screen-reader-accessible government pages. It's important that our clients be able to manage massive amounts of content with the help of many editors while maintaining accessibility and a unified style and structure.
At multiple San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies we replaced hand-built schedule pages with automated GTFS imports, filterable timetables, consolidated alert feeds, and maps with live train positions. At SFMTA we run the realtime layer — stop-level alerts, vehicle positions, arrival predictions — and the departure displays in the field, including the pylons at the Salesforce Transit Center.
For government and nonprofit clients the recurring problems are agendas and minutes on statutory publishing deadlines, document retention rules, WCAG and Section 508 conformance, multilingual publishing that mixes machine and human translation, and media archives large enough that they only stay usable with transcription, captioning, and clip-level metadata. We are comfortable implementing AI solutions and always work as real people with real people to get the job done in the best way possible.
FivePaths is a certified California Small Business Enterprise and a vendor on the City and County of San Francisco Technology Marketplace.
eric [at] fivepaths.com · 415.326.3483 · fivepaths.com
Drupal Contributions
Nearly everything we release began as a client problem worth generalizing.
The GTFS suite is eight GPL-2.0+ modules for Drupal 10 and 11 that turn an agency's GTFS and GTFS-Realtime feeds into rider-facing surfaces. The data core (gtfs) models the specification as fieldable, revisionable, translatable entities behind a versioned REST API. gtfs_rt ingests trip updates, vehicle positions and service alerts from Protobuf endpoints and republishes them as normalized JSON. gtfs_display drives departure boards for stops, routes or whole systems. gtfs_display_map and gtfs_display_map_rt render MapLibre vector maps with live vehicles and embeddable variants. gtfs_schedule publishes readable timetables. gtfs_511 provisions feeds for any operator on the 511 SF Bay open-data API. gtfs_plus handles the GTFS+ extension files some regional feeds carry.
The suite is in daily service at major U.S. transit agencies, and the code running our managed deployments is the code published here. Overview and API reference: gtfs.media.
Outside transit: SASS/SCSS Compiler (co-maintained, ~450 sites), OpenStreetMap node and way sync through Overpass queries (~85 sites), Entity Search & Replace for batched database rewrites (~47 sites), Response Filesystem Cache for serving dynamic endpoints at static-file speed, Field History, Image Aspect Ratio Tagging, Image Compressor, Client-Side Video Media Thumbnails, and Signmaker UI.
Two of our developers maintain under the handles tbcs and jpsalter. Issues and merge requests get answered, and we take co-maintainers.