Re: OpenTripPlanner in New Orleans

[David Turner]

On Mon, 2012-06-11 at 08:32 -0700, Joel Carranza wrote:
> Hello all,
>
>
> I'm working on a citizien-driven project in New Orleans whose goal is
> to make bike transportation easier and safer within the city. One idea
> we are investigating is a mobile webapp which uses OpenTripPlanner for
> bike+public transit route planning. I've successfully setup and
> deployed OpenTripPlanner with New Orleans data and I have a couple
> questions that I hope somebody can answer. Here it goes:
>
>
> - Deployment Requirements. What kind of machine do I need to run the
> webapp? I can generate the Graph.obj file offline on a pretty big
> desktop machine, but we will need to fund the hosting server.
> Currently i've squeezed the New Orleans graph (Graph.obj file is
> 135MB) onto a Linode instance with 512 MB of RAM. Tomcat gets 325MB of
> that. It's slow but it works. I am not sure it will stay up under
> load.

We don't have a good way right now to find the memory usage of a
particular instance -- experimentation is the best way.

> - We want to improve the quality of biking directions. How are bike
> routes chosen? Is there some documentation somewhere on which OSM tags
> are used for bicycling routing?

There's DefaultWayPropertySetSource.java, as well as the general graph
builder documentation at:
https://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner/wiki/GraphBuilder

> - The streetcars in New Orleans (labelled as "Trams" in
> OpenTripPlanner) do not allow for bikes to be brought on board. How
> can we encode this restriction in the graph? I'm a software developer
> who deals with java on a daily basis, so I can make code modifications
> if necessary.

You can simply set the defaultBikesAllowed=false in your graph builder
XML file -- it's a property of GtfsBundle.

If some of your transit vehicles do allow bikes and others don't,
there's a GTFS column (a proposed extension) bikes_allowed in trips.txt
which you can use.

> - The 5 Minute walkthrough on setting up OpenTripPlanner has a section
> on "Contraction". I didn't see the relevant lines in graph-builder.xml
> Is this feature still there? Would this increase or decrease the size
> of the graph?

It would (despite the name) increase the size of the graph. It's also
much less relevant these days. I'll edit the walkthrough.

> - Mobile. We are primarily interested in accessing this via mobile
> devices. Is there a mobile webapp available?
>
There have been a few over the years:
https://github.com/openplans/OpenTripPlanner/wiki/GraphBuilder
http://code.google.com/p/otp-android/
>
> Some bugs or unexpected features:
> - Intermediate Points - I couldn't get those to work.

They are not supported for transit trips, for performance reasons.

> - Maxium bike distance seems to be ignored.

For non-transit trips, it is ignored.

For bike+transit trips (or walk+transit), if no plan is available, the
planner retries with a double walk distance.

> Overall, I'm really impressed with OpenTripPlanner. I was able to
> follow the tutorials and get up and running very quickly. Big thanks
> to everyone who helped make it happen.

Thanks!