Peak hour trains flag

[Yuriy Yakimenko]

This concerns mostly train travel. A number of agencies list special
"peak hour" trains. Often peak hour train means higher fares.So, in
some ways it's covered by information in fares files. Also, the place
a person is going to often matters. NJ TRANSIT charges "peak hour"
fares only if one is traveling to/from NYC or Newark or Secaucus
Station. A similar rule applies to LIRR. MBTA, however, does not
charge higher fares for riding peak hour trains unless the ticket is
bought on board.

I suggest adding "peak_hour_trip" flag (0 or 1) to trips.txt and
"peak_hour_stop" to stops.txt. This will help to determine peak hour
trips without digging the fares file which sometimes is missing and
even when present not always contains this information.

[Joe Hughes]

Hi Yuriy,

Thanks for the proposal. A couple questions:

1) In your proposal, how would the peak_hour_trip flag interact with
the peak_hour_stop flag? Under which conditions would a trip be
considered "peak"?
2) Assuming you've been experimenting with this information in your
trainlogic.net/TrainSchedule application, how is this information used
in the app? This would help clarify whether this is representing
information that can't currently be represented in fares.txt.

Thanks,
Joe

[Yuriy Yakimenko]

For NJ transit trains, a passenger is required to pay a higher "peak
hour" fee when
it's a "peak hour train" (going to New York/Newark Penn/Newark Broad
St/Hoboken/Secaucus in the morning hours OR going from these five
stops in the afternoon between 4pm and 7pm) AND the passenger is
actually going to/from these stations. It means if I travel from
Princeton to Edison (even on a peak hour train) I don't pay higher
fees, because Edison is earlier on my route than Newark or New York.

The same rule applies to LIRR, except they have their own "peak
stops" (one is New York Penn,
another is Long Island City, I think). So, I keep peak hour flag for
each trip and for each stop in a particular schedule. MBTA says (I
called them specifically to check this) that peak hour trips apply no
matter which stops you're visiting once it's a peak hour train. In
this case, I have to mark every stop as peak hour stop. But they also
told me that MBTA does not charge higher fees on those trains. It's
just to inform you that there are many people expected on those
trains. I have no way to verify this because I'm not in Boston. The
MBTA website, overall very impressive, does not provide much detail on
this.

Yuriy

[Greg]

Depending on how you calculatre peak time, either by the time of day
or the trip, here are an idea for each.

If peak fares are paid based on the start of the trip here is an
example

In the fare_rules.txt you add the following field
fare_start_time - blank = all the time
fare_end_time - Dblank = never

If you have a peak fare you would then enter the start and end time of
the peak schedule and Google Transot would use that, at all other
times of the day Google transit would use the fare when the fields are
blank.

OR

If the trip is classified as a peak trip then you could assign a value
to a particular trip in the fare_rules.txt file, leraving the trip
field blank would default to all trips not specified otherwise.

I hope this makes snes, i am writting this while sitting in an airport
waiting for a delayed flight and being annoyed by the constant
messages saying the same thing over and over again. WHY DID I TAKE
THE TRAIN?