School Buses

[Catrina]

Also something else we have been discussing.....schoolbuses.

 Are there any plans to include schoolbuses as vehicle types in the GTFS? 

 In NSW school buses are often run by the same entities that run normal commuter services. So in some cases they are normal buses, sometimes fully dedicated to school runs, but often after school travel times they return to normal scheduled trips.

 In a trip plan we currently cannot differentiate a schoolbus from a normal bus, so we have the issue of commuters showing up for school buses. As such we have removed all school bus data from our feed - however parents/kids also want to be able to plan their trip to school or see where the bus is (when we go realtime).

Hence a way to distinguish school buses is desired.

[Jonathan Wilson]

Same thing in Perth, school buses are regular Transperth buses running
"school special" services.

[Nicholas Albion]

Maybe it’s not too different in concept from the “bikes_allowed” proposal to trips.txt – ie “students_allowed”, that way you could just let Google (or other app) know that you are a student & these trips would be included in your options. (parents would have to log in as their children)

[Jonathan Wilson]

Nicholas Albion wrote:
>
>
> Maybe it�s not too different in concept from the �bikes_allowed� proposal
> to trips.txt � ie �students_allowed�, that way you could just let Google

> (or other app) know that you are a student & these trips would be included
> in your options. (parents would have to log in as their children)
>

Based on how they work over here, a better term would be "students_only",
i.e. a flag to say that its a student-only run (as opposed to a general run
that anyone, including students, can catch)

[Bradley Tollison]

Are regular passengers not permitted on these trips? In the US it's
illegal for a public transit agency to provide service specifically to
school children unless we allow anyone to ride. So for example, we can
have an alternative trip start at a school, but anyone at this stop
and any of the others are allowed to ride.

On Oct 9, 2012, at 23:19, Jonathan Wilson <jfw...@tpgi.com.au> wrote:

> Nicholas Albion wrote:
>>
>>
>> Maybe it’s not too different in concept from the “bikes_allowed” proposal

>> to trips.txt – ie “students_allowed”, that way you could just let Google

>> (or other app) know that you are a student & these trips would be included
>> in your options. (parents would have to log in as their children)
>>
> Based on how they work over here, a better term would be "students_only", i.e. a flag to say that its a student-only run (as opposed to a general run that anyone, including students, can catch)
>

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[Roger Slevin]

The situation in the UK is that we have at least three primary types of school transport :

·         Services only available to students

·         Journeys on a public bus service which predominantly carry students and only run on schooldays

·         Journeys on a public bus service which runs throughout the year but on schooldays has a high load of students

 

We do not include the first of these types in our public transport data - though at the start of the school year there is some demand for this information as parents sort out the travel arrangements for their children (normally the day before term starts - even though they have known their kids will need to travel to and from their “new” school for months before).  Encoding such services into our public transport database, however, would be a major commitment of resources for very limited benefits - so we have not included them so far - and dedicated school buses have a habit of changing at short notice as they have to respond to changes in demand as families move house, particularly in rural areas, or as demand fluctuates from year to year .

 

We show schoolday-only journeys in our data …  some such journeys, however, are positioning runs and are not used by students.  There is a view that many adult bus users will avoid journeys marked “Sch” as a bus full of school children may not be the most pleasant environment in which to travel.

 

There is no way of showing the third of these categories - even though the public might like a warning that a particular journey will be full of school children on schooldays.

 

Roger

 

-----Original Message-----
From: gtfs-c...@googlegroups.com [mailto:gtfs-c...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jonathan Wilson
Sent: 10 October 2012 7:19 AM
To: gtfs-c...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [gtfs-changes] Re: School Buses

 

Nicholas Albion wrote:

> 

> 

> Maybe it’s not too different in concept from the “bikes_allowed”

> proposal to trips.txt – ie “students_allowed”, that way you could just

> let Google (or other app) know that you are a student & these trips

> would be included in your options. (parents would have to log in as

> their children)

> 

Based on how they work over here, a better term would be "students_only", i.e. a flag to say that its a student-only run (as opposed to a general run that anyone, including students, can catch)

 

--

[T Sobota]

Our transit system (in the United States) reflects the regulatory observation below by establishing a second "agency" within our data feed to "operate" the supplemental school day transit trips.  This is largely facilitated by virtue of our scheduling our buses operating both the mainline and supplemental trips in the same software package - and being able to export both types of service into the GTFS format.

This agency distinction does help further distinguish the various calendar dates the supplemental trips do or do not operate, and allows a custom agency description text to appear in itinerary output for any trip/route "operated" by that second agency, etc.  The particular stop_times for a supplemental trip commute towards the school destination also happen to be coded predominantly "coordinate with driver" for "pickup_type" while "drop_off_type" is set as "not available" - to reflect the operation of the service (then coded in opposite manner for commute trips away from school).

This two-agency practice has fulfilled the goal of allowing students to plan their school commute using our GTFS data feed, while minimizing these supplemental trips from being displayed to unintended riders.  

Link below shows an example with trips on both supplemental route "E3" and mainline route "06" - each within their own "agency" (you may need to adjust dates, to the extent link is coded to arrive "today" by 8:05am... future todays might not be school days)

http://goo.gl/maps/oFLIF

[Derek Hofmann]

Similarly, you could have an "employees_only" flag for shuttle vans operated by employers.

Or you could combine "students_only" and "employees_only" into a single flag and name it something like "private".

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 11:19 PM, Jonathan Wilson <jfw...@tpgi.com.au> wrote:

Nicholas Albion wrote:

Maybe it’s not too different in concept from the “bikes_allowed” proposal

to trips.txt – ie “students_allowed”, that way you could just let Google

(or other app) know that you are a student & these trips would be included
in your options. (parents would have to log in as their children)

Based on how they work over here, a better term would be "students_only", i.e. a flag to say that its a student-only run (as opposed to a general run that anyone, including students, can catch)

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[Nicholas Albion]

Brian & Joe,

Has there been any progress on the route_type proposal?  Can you confirm that Google Transit will support the following values for route_type?

700 Bus Service

712 School Bus

We plan to update the Sydney GTFS feed using these TPEG route_types to distinguish between regular bus services and school buses.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/gtfs-changes/keT5rTPS7Y0/71uMz2l6ke0J

[Brian Ferris]

So I went back and dug into the code and I can confirm that Google Transit does not currently support the School Bus route type TPEG code.  It will take a little bit of work to support it properly on our side, but I will see if I can get the ball rolling on that.

Brian

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[Brian Ferris]

Though to clarify, we do support the 700 code for regular bus service.

[Koch]

Could Google Transit start supporting the 714 type? It stands for rail replacement busses.

Kind regards,

Thomas Koch

Op donderdag 29 november 2012 00:27:44 UTC+1 schreef Brian Ferris het volgende:

[Nicholas Albion]

+1