Re: Bike-sharing systems

[Nicholas Albion]

The first 6 fields in your bike_sharing_stations proposal are duplicates of fields in stops.txt, I think it's best to keep that data where it belongs

Google Transit currently support specifying route_type using TPEG values.  The best match seems to be "1604 Hire Cycle"

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

There's also an existing proposal for stop_amenities: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/gtfs-changes/WRB5AgTA1bI

I think your needs could be met by adding a "quantity" field to stop_amenities.txt to convey the number of bike racks:

stop_id, amenity_type, quantity, url

As for number_of_bikes - maybe this could be conveyed using GTFS-Realtime:

VehiclePosition: { trip:{trip_id:bike_id}, vehicle:{id:bike_id, label/license_plate:customer_facing_identifier}, position(only when checked-in at a rack?): {latitude:stop_lat, longitude: stop_lon}, stop_id: stop_id, current_status: STOPPED_AT, timestamp: timestamp}

[Guillaume]

Hello,

You are absolutely right for the first 6 fields, let's keep them in stops.txt

You are also right, the stop_amenities proposal could address this need.

Only one comment : "url" would then be duplicate in stop_amenities.txt, since there is already "stop_url" in stops.txt, isn't it ?

About the bike routes, I was mainly thinking about route planners that already know the roads available in the city and already have the ability to propose road itineraries (as most route planners on the web).Therefore those route planners could propose automatically to use shared bikes in a transit itinerary, without the need to describe in the feed, all the routes between each pair of shared bikes stations.
However this doesn't forbid to put these routes in a GTFS feed, for route planners that don't have these "road features".

I will express my need in the "stop_amenities" topic, and if we manage to get shared bikes stations supported in GTFS format, then later I will look at GTFS-Realtime.
And also at a way to describe the shared bikes fare in the feed, and its average speed (it depends on the amount of hills in the city (some route planners don't know the road elevation in the city), and it also depends if the bikes are powered by electric motors).

Thanks for this help.

[Robert Seidl]

I am wondering - would this concept be generalizable to other sharing services (with x resources at y stations, with resource utilization costing z per hour or mile) like car sharing (DriveNow, Car2Go, ZipCar, Hertz on demand) or scootnetworks.com etc. or is that bending the GTFS format too much towards something it was not designed for ?

Seems they have a lot in common...

Robert

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[Brian Ferris]

First off, I appreciate the proposal from Guillaume, as I've often thought it would be great to have the equivalent of GTFS for bicycle infrastructure.  That said, I also agree with Robert's assessment that it might be stretching the GTFS format a bit.  I'd rather see some new spec (GBFS?  not to be confused with the UK's Garden Bird Feeding Survey) that shares a lot of the same DNA as GTFS (easy to edit, easy to extend, etc) but that doesn't have to bend over backwards to fit itself into the GTFS data model.

Thoughts?  Maybe someone has already done some work in this area?

[Guillaume]

I updated my proposal : https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gtfs-changes/WRB5AgTA1bI/7FGNOjXopdIJ

Brian, what other files are you thinking of regarding bike sharing systems?

Because if there is only one (or even two or three) file(s), it would seem strange to me to create a new spec ("GBFS") for just one or two files, wouldn't it?