TANK bus data

[Chris Davis]

I emailed TANK - here's the reply:

TANK’s policy is to make this data publicly available as well.  Here are a few links for you to bookmark:

 

1)       http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFeeds - TANK shares a link to our feed via Google’s public data feed list for Google Transit.  If in the future you can’t find us, check here first. 

2)       http://imi.nku.edu/tankgoogletransit/latest/google_transit.zip - Our current feed is always located here.  We update it 3-4 times per year. 

3)       http://imi.nku.edu/tankgoogletransit/latest/Data%20Downloads%20legal%20notice%20for%20google%20site.pdf – We have a real quick legal notice / license agreement you should read.  There’s nothing you have to sign or anything. 

 

I’m responsible for creating and maintaining TANK’s Google Transit data feed, and have been doing so since 2008.  If you have any questions about the feed, TANK, or transit in general feel free to shoot me an email or give me a call. I’d be happy to talk. 

 

Finally, I want to convey a few things about our feed that might be of importance to you, depending on how you intend to use the data:

1)      FEED EXPIRATION DATE: google requires every agency to put a start_date and end_date within each feed.  This tells google when the feed is valid.  The end_date in the feed is always a best-guess at the time we create the feed, and it almost always changes (it’s probably accurate to within +/- 30 days).   Once we get close to the end of the current feed’s lifespan, we will update the file with an accurate end_date. 

2)      FARE INFORMATION: google’s schema for calculating fares for trips is not robust enough to handle a lot of trip scenarios within TANK’s system (and if you’re transferring from TANK to Metro forget it).  Most transit agencies don’t include any fare info at all because of this, and TANK made a decision last year to do the same.  However, we still include some fare information within the feed that is fetched by our kiosk at CVG international airport, but it’s not used anywhere else in the feed.  I’d recommend if you develop an app to not include fare information as it won’t work properly. 

3)      FEED HOST LOCATION: There is a slight chance that the 2^nd URL above (where we host our feed and where google fetches it from) will change in the future.  If it does, we’ll post the new public feed location on google’s list of public feeds (1^st URL above).