Personal introduction, leading up to GTFS workshop

[Kevin Chambers]

Hello all—

 

Kevin Webb suggested I send a short introduction of myself and my work to this list so we can start to know one another before the Tuesday’s event. I encourage others to do the same.

 

I work at Ride Connection, a Portland, Oregon based private nonprofit that does community-based transportation, primarily for older adults, people with disabilities, and people in rural areas around the Portland metro region. We do a lot of coordinating with other organizations in the region, but we've been stymied by how difficult it is to coordinate operationally with other agencies that have their own scheduling and dispatch systems. In response, we're building an open-source clearinghouse for moving trips between systems so that a trip requested by organization A can be fulfilled by organization B, and vice versa.

 

Broad success for our project relies on establishing common interfaces and data formats for sharing individual trips, something that has not existed in the industry thus far. We're hoping that what we're developing will help catalyze conversations in the sector about the need for them.

 

For those interested, the clearinghouse code repository is here: https://github.com/rideconnection/clearinghouse. An integration tool is here: https://github.com/rideconnection/clearinghouse-adapter. Both have accompanying wikis with API and data format specifications.  Finally, there are a number of high level documents describing the project in this Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-1RgO-4FC4yOTNVRHR2dTlISDg&usp=sharing.

 

I look forward to meeting those of you who will be attending the workshop!

 

Kevin Chambers

IT Director

Ride Connection

503.528.1747

www.rideconnection.org

 

"To Link accessible, responsive transportation with community needs" 

 

[Aaron Antrim]

I would also like to introduce myself to the group before Tuesday’s workshop.

I am a consultant based in Portland, Oregon, and the owner of a small company, Trillium.  Most of Trillium's clients are U.S.-based, and, among other things, they hire us to create and maintain GTFS data and then facilitate its integration in 3rd party applications.  Several of Trillium’s clients operate general service dial-a-ride or flexible services, in addition to fixed-route service.  Hence in 2009, I made a proposal to gtfs-changes to describe some of these services with GTFS (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gtfs-changes/zBhhIXked7g).

More recently, I have been supporting a project to create and use GTFS data in China.  Part of the project is to help transit agencies describe their services in the existing Specification, and also to determine how the Spec could be improved to describe the services more accurately.  Immediately, the GTFS data will be used to generate indicators for assessing and benchmarking transit service.  Eventually, it is possible this would be used for passenger-facing information systems, too.  I will be one of the panelists in a morning session on this project.

I understand that the primary purpose of this workshop was to discuss international applications of GTFS.  Personally, one of my primary interests is in seeing what lessons and resources the developing and developed worlds can borrow from each other.

-- 
Aaron Antrim
www.trilliumtransit.com
Portland, Oregon

[tay...@itpworld.net]

Hi All

Following Kevin and Aaron's useful lead, I thought I would post a quick introduction to say 'Hi' ahead of the GTFS For the Rest of Us event taking place in Washington DC on Tuesday...

I am a transport consultant who works for ITP (www.itpworld.net), has been familiar with GTFS since about 2010, and worked with GTFS in less structured transit contexts since 2011.  Working on behalf of the Department of Transport and Communications in the Philippines, and facilitated by grant funding received from the World Bank, I led a team which developed the first GTFS data-set for Metro Manila.  Through the course of this project I worked with colleagues at ITP (Ian Stott) and Conveyal (Kevin Webb and David Emory) to develop the open source GTFS Editor and TransitWand tools which can be used by city authorities and transit operators to create and maintain transit databases.  The project involved substantial data collection by colleagues at the University of the Philippines, and lots of head-scratching on everyone's part, to understand how we could make GTFS 'work' in Metro Manila as a dataset for sharing information about non-structured road-based transit in the city.  I also contributed to a similar World Bank funded project in Mexico City - led by my colleague Ian - which drew on learning and software tools from the project in Metro Manila to create Mexico City's first GTFS feed.  As well as the feed itself, the project delivered considerable training to local transit agency staff (facilitated and led by colleagues at SETRAVI), in-field testing and validation of the TransitWand tool, and a simple transit disruption-tracking tool which was developed by Kevin, David and Andrew Byrd at Conveyal - leveraging the GTFS RT spec.  Through this project I was responsible (with Kevin and Ian) for initiating this 'Making GTFS Work for the Rest of the World' discussion group, and facilitating the initial dialogue between different transit agencies and project teams around the world that have been working to use GTFS as a means of modelling less structured transit systems in a range of contexts.

I am really looking forward to Tuesday's event in Washington.  As well as being able to put faces to names that I have spoken/exchanged emails with several times; I am particularly interested in learning more about the various efforts to collect transit data, and understanding the motivations for/approaches to using GTFS in different city contexts around the world.

Cheers

Neil

Neil Taylor

Integrated Transport Planning Ltd.

www.itpworld.net