Severe Weather Commuter Rail schedules in GTFS

[Developer at MBTA]

Hello all,

As you may know, the MBTA's commuter-rail schedules have contingency plans built in for severe weather events. On the current schedule, the severe-weather conditions are labeled as "Blue" (a schedule which consists of a regular weekday schedule with certain trips canceled, as depicted on the PDF schedules at mbta.com) and "Orange" (a schedule that has not yet been publicly announced for each line, but will consist of a further reduction of service). The purpose of this post is to describe how we will implement these in GTFS, if a severe-weather event should occur.

If it is announced that a Blue or Orange schedule condition is going to be put into effect, we will publish a new GTFS file the previous evening which has the new trips added, with new service_ids. We will use calendar_dates.txt to add the "Blue" or "Orange" service on the appropriate date.

Note that we have also split our service_id values into "NorthSide" and "SouthSide" because it is possible that the severe weather condition will apply to only the services that terminate at North Station or those that terminate at South Station.

The service_ids will be as follows:

CR-Weekday-SouthSide

CR-Weekday-NorthSide

CR-Saturday-SouthSide

CR-Saturday-NorthSide

CR-Sunday-SouthSide

CR-Sunday-NorthSide

CR-SevereWeatherBlue-SouthSide

CR-SevereWeatherBlue-NorthSide

CR-SevereWeatherOrange-SouthSide

CR-SevereWeatherOrange-NorthSide

You can download a GTFS file with the "SevereWeatherBlue" trips added in at this link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/k6jb6kekz9gk8sx/MBTA_GTFS_plus_Blue.zip?dl=0. Please feel free to use this file in a test environment (pick a date for a "simulated snowstorm", then add a couple lines to calendar_dates.txt to de-activate the normal service and activate the Blue service).

The reason we have not officially added them to the GTFS file is that many validation tools will refuse to validate a file that has a service_id that is never used. The reason that the "SevereWeatherOrange" trips are not included is because the Orange schedule variants have not been officially announced yet, and are still subject to change. If an Orange schedule condition arises, we will be able to get those trips added as well.

Let us know if you have any questions or issues with this way of handling the Severe Weather schedules.

Sincerely,

Developer@MBTA