Bay Area GTFS availability?
Steve Haflich
My group wants to prototype a web database application that would do
the inverse of what the usual trip planners do. Rather than computing
how to get from place A to place B at some particular time, the
application would compute and rank a selection of places where several
needs could be satisfied for multiple parties using public transit.
(So back ending from some web-available trip planner won't work, since
those assume you already know where you want to go.)
Our preferable area of interest would be the SF Bay Area, and GTFS
data for the several large transit agencies would be just the thing.
We've already discovered that the enlightened folks at BART and
CalTrain make GTFS feeds freely available, but what about the other
agencies (Muni, AC Transit, etc.)?
I could easily understand that the data are simply unavailable, but it
is clear that outfits like the Google transit and the 511.org trip
planners must have this data available. It's also clear that their
data wasn't obtained by html scraping, since these planners are able
to refer to local bus stops that aren't even on the abridged schedules
such as published online by AC Transit. I guess humans are easily
capable of interpolating arrival times, but Google knows the exact
location of each local stop and can map same.
Can anyone answer definitively whether GTFS data or any logical
equivalent is readily available for the missing agencies? Or is this
a case where Google and 511.org have made deals with the owners of
this proprietary data?
Aaron Antrim
public access.
One agency which has has found they can put more riders on their buses
and trains and keep happier customers and a community by sharing their
data is Trimet in Portland.
Their CTO gave a great presentation on sharing data: http://www.tinyurl.com/trimet-cto
Also, they have a developer site: http://developer.trimet.org
I encourage you to share Trimet's example with transit agencies that
choose not to share their data.
Cheers,
Aaron
JP
> a case where Google and 511.org have made deals with the owners of
> this proprietary data?
Individual transit agencies (TA's) build relationships with Google to
provide GTFS feeds to Google. Some decided to publish their feeds,
some haven't, for a variety of reasons. Personally I am all for
publishing the feeds; Aaron mention TriMet. They have taken the lead,
and most agencies have adopted their license in some form or another.
MTC is a government agency, and "the transportation planning,
coordinating and financing agency for the nine-county San Francisco
Bay Area" (http://www.mtc.ca.gov/about_mtc/about.htm)
TA's in the Bay Area which request federal funds (i.e. all) have to go
through MTC and meet MTC requirements such as following the Bay Area
ITS Architecture or, in the case of transit data, feed transit data
back to MTC for use in MTC's passenger information systems such as
511.org.
JP
GPK
You can try http://transit.511.org/accessible/datafeed/feed_desc.htm. It provides data for all agencies in transit.511.org system.
Best
Giedrius Praspaliauskas
Tom Brown
http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/w/edit/PublicFeeds
current. I look forward to the day that this wiki page stops scaling.
Useful and fun applications, such as what you want to build, will
encourage agencies to make data available. Good luck!
I recommend you take a look at this group
http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers/browse_thread/thread/62cafc1475bc2a02
Check out this gallery of images generated with graphserver:
http://graphserver.sourceforge.net/gallery.html
Tom Brown
> Useful and fun applications, such as what you want to build, will
> encourage agencies to make data available. Good luck!
Bay Area on Sept 13 or 14 come to http://barcamp.org/TransitCampBayArea2
;-)
GPK
You can try http://transit.511.org/accessible/datafeed/feed_desc.htm. It provides data for all agencies in transit.511.org system.
Best
Giedrius Praspaliauskas
Joe Hughes
That sounds like a very cool application. I hope you keep at it,
because uses like these help demonstrate the value of maintaining
public schedule data to agencies.
As others have pointed out, Google gets GTFS feeds from individual
agencies in the bay area, though not all of them have decided to
publish their feeds to a wider audience yet. They also share data
with MTC, which republishes it in an ad-hoc CSV format with somewhat
restrictive terms of service--see this thread for some details:
http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers/browse_frm/thread/bae6dc26f895f93a
I would encourage you to join the transit developers mailing list,
since there's a lot of discussion of data and its uses there:
http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers
Also, the upcoming TransitCampBayArea in September would be a great
place to demo your project and talk to agency folks about getting
data:
http://barcamp.org/TransitCampBayArea2
Joe
smh
On Aug 13, 8:55 am, "Joe Hughes" <joe.hughes.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> That sounds like a very cool application. I hope you keep at it,
> because uses like these help demonstrate the value of maintaining
> public schedule data to agencies.
replies were helpful, and I have a query in to 511 to see if we can
get the data.
As for evangelizing the use of public data, I'm all for it, and we'll
try to do our share. My sense is that in the geospatial community
this
is almost a won battle. Public agencies are often natually on the
conservative side, but they will soon be caught up in the swell.
Thanks again!
Tom Hixson
federal FOIA statute) for the feed, and made the feed site public
(with disclaimer) for our convenience. That possibility might give
you some attention..
Tom Hixson
Sacramento