What is the issue and why is it an issue?

Right now GBFS uses seconds since the epoch as a timestamp, for example in the last_updated field. While this practice is pretty wide-spread, it makes debugging feeds a little harder than necessary.

Every time I need to check the last_updated field I need to copy the epoch seconds, google "epoch to time converter", paste the seconds to get a usable date time.

While this isn't an impossible task, I think there are alternatives that are both human-readable and unique so that machines can identify a universal point in time.

Please describe some potential solutions you have considered (even if they aren’t related to GBFS).

I suggest that GBFS uses ISO-8601 date times. An example would be 2023-07-06T11:35:33+0200.

This is much easier to interpret for a human and can be parsed easily by many programming languages.

This is of course a major breaking change so it can only be introduced for a major version jump.

Is your potential solution a breaking change?

• Yes, very much so
• No
• Unsure