Proposal - street direction & relative position in stops.txt

[Mike Gilligan]

Summary:
TriMet has been supplying a quarterly export of our stops database to
the Sendero Group since 2004. The Sendero Group offers GPS devices to
the visually impaired, as well as, points of interest data files
including transit. More information is available here:
http://trimet.org/access/wayfinding.htm

Problem:
All of the data we send is currently part of the GTFS or an open
proposal, except street direction (North, South, East, or Westbound
stop) and relative position (Nearside, Farside, Opposite, or At the
location). If we could add the following fields, the developer at the
Sendero Group could parse our GTFS and create the transit POI data
from that.

Proposal:
Add 2 new fields to the stops.txt file
- direction (North, South, East, West)
- position (Nearside, Farside, Opposite)

An enum to represent both fields is probably a cleaner solution but
here is my rough proposal. I have added both fields to the current
TriMet feed as an example.

Any thoughts?

[Tom Hixson]

I consider Direction mandatory, as it helps insure the rider is on the
correct side of the street (and discourages a mad dash across the
street!). Position doesn't have a safety aspect, but mid-block stops
can easily be out of sight of the intersection. Of course the map
also provides this info, but the text alone should be able to stand on
its own.

[Marc Ferguson]

To weigh in with what Mike and Van have mentioned thus far ...

"location" of the stop is most often in the set:  Near, Far, Mid block, Opposite and At.

The side of the street really varies from agency to agency.  The most common interpretations are:  Direction of the route, Heading of the bus at the stop and compass position.

This is were having a posted stop number comes in very handy.  If they are standing at a far side stop and they were told it is stop 1234 then they would know they were in the wrong place.  

Marc Ferguson
marc.f...@trapezegroup.com
757-961-9224 x304

Mike Gilligan <mgil...@gmail.com> Sent by: gtfs-c...@googlegroups.com 08/19/2008 06:14 PM Please respond to gtfs-c...@googlegroups.com

To Google Transit Feed Spec Changes <gtfs-c...@googlegroups.com> cc Subject [gtfs-changes] Proposal - street direction & relative position in stops.txt

[Joe Hughes]

I think it would be great to make GTFS more suitable for applications
like Sendero's. Could you give the group more context about how the
proposed fields would get surfaced in the Sendero UI?

Joe

[Joe Hughes]

I think it would be great to make GTFS more suitable for applications
like Sendero's. Could you give the group more context about how the
proposed fields would get surfaced in the Sendero UI?

Joe

[l...@thetransitapp.com]

Pull Request added for a `stops.relative_position` field:

https://github.com/google/transit/pull/48