OBA GTFS wheelchair accessibility information support

[David Turner]

There's a proposal on GTFS-changes to add wheelchair accessibility
information to GTFS. I have written a patch to OBA's GTFS loader (used
by OTP) to read this information in. It is attached. I also have the
relevant changes made to OTP to use this information, and will commit
them once a new OBA-GTFS is released.

[David Turner]

Sorry, I meant this version of the patch. Stupid mail client cached it.

[Brian Ferris]

Hey David,

Happy to add this functionality.  I'm wondering if you'd be willing to add a simple unit test as well?  Or at least send me a snippet of a stops.txt file that has the wheelchair column set?

Brian

[David Turner]

I wrote the unit test in OTP rather than in OBA, so let me send you the
updated test gtfs for that.

[Brian Ferris]

I just read over the original wheelchair_accessible thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/gtfs-changes/browse_thread/thread/f98f8fa7c4cc8430/a2a75c3841f48ae9

Do you have any thoughts about making the field an int instead of a boolean?  This would make it easier to support expanding the values of "wheelchair_accessible" in the future, especially if an agency wanted to provide "accessible, but with a caveat" data as discussed in the thread.

Brian

[David Turner]

I chose to do a boolean because I wanted to keep it simple. I think
accessible-with-notes can still be provided for -- if the notes column
is non-empty, the stop or trip is accessible-with-notes.

If you do decide to go with an integer, tho, that's cool. I'll just
change the otp code.

[David Turner]

Just writing to make sure this didn't get lost. Since my changes to OTP
for wheelchair accessibility involved some changes to testagency.zip,
merging is a pain in the butt. Can you either merge this patch and
release a new version, or tell me what I need to change to get the patch
accepted?

[Brian Ferris]

Sorry about the delay.  It's definitely on my radar, but I've been slammed this week and I haven't been able to get around to an official release.  I will try to get to it tonight / tomorrow.

[Brian Ferris]

I've just checked in updates to the onebusaway-gtfs library (released as 1.0.3) to support David's wheelchair accessibility modifications.  

Additionally, the updated library has better methods for determining if a value has been supplied for an optional field represented by a primitive type. I've opened a ticket for this issue:

http://opentripplanner.org/ticket/92

I will try to go through and make changes where necessary, but it's a little bit of a subtle issue, so keep your eyes open.

Brian