specification: API Commons Rate Limits
specificationVersion: '0.1'
schema: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/interface-research/main/schema/api-commons.yml#/$defs/RateLimits
provider: Bureau of Transportation Statistics
providerId: bureau-of-transportation-statistics
generated: '2026-09-05'
created: '2026-05-04'
modified: '2026-09-05'
method: searched
source: >-
  https://dev.socrata.com/docs/app-tokens.html and
  https://dev.socrata.com/docs/response-codes.html — the platform documentation
  data.bts.gov's own portal links as its Documentation property — plus live responses from
  https://data.bts.gov and https://geodata.bts.gov observed 2026-09-05
limit_count: 0
description: >-
  NO NUMERIC RATE LIMIT IS PUBLISHED ANYWHERE. BTS states none, and the platform
  documentation deliberately states none either: requests carrying an application token
  are "not throttled ... unless those requests are determined to be abusive or malicious",
  and requests without a token "come from a shared pool via IP address" where "IP
  addresses that make too many requests during a given period may be subject to
  throttling". No number, no window, no burst. What IS documented is the exhaustion
  signal: HTTP 429. limit_count is 0 because there is no published limit to count, not
  because none is enforced.
policy:
  anonymous:
    pool: shared-per-ip
    limit: null
    window: null
    note: Subject to throttling at an unpublished threshold.
  with_app_token:
    pool: per-token
    limit: null
    window: null
    note: >-
      Not throttled except for abuse. Register free at
      https://data.bts.gov/profile/edit/developer_settings; send X-App-Token on every
      request (or $$app_token as a query parameter).
headers:
  observed: []
  note: >-
    No RateLimit-*, X-RateLimit-* or Retry-After header appeared on any live BTS response
    observed 2026-09-05 (headers present were ETag, Last-Modified, X-Socrata-RequestId,
    X-Socrata-Region, Strict-Transport-Security, Access-Control-Allow-Origin). An agent
    therefore has NO forward-looking budget signal — it learns it is over the line only by
    receiving a 429. Back off exponentially and honour the robots.txt Crawl-delay: 1 on
    data.bts.gov and Crawl-delay: 60 on geodata.bts.gov.
responseCodes:
  throttled: 429
  quotaExceeded: 429
  serviceUnavailable: 500
crawl_delay:
  - {host: data.bts.gov, source: https://data.bts.gov/robots.txt, seconds: 1}
  - {host: geodata.bts.gov, source: https://geodata.bts.gov/robots.txt, seconds: 60}
result_size_limits:
  - {api: SODA, param: $limit, default: 1000, max: 50000, source: openapi/bureau-of-transportation-statistics-resource-api-openapi.yml}
limits: []
supersedes:
  note: >-
    This file replaces a 2026-05-04 bulk-sweep scaffold that asserted a free tier of 10
    requests/minute with a burst of 20 and a full set of X-RateLimit-* response headers.
    None of those numbers or headers exists on this API; all are removed. See roadmap#35.