The GTFS Digest is a resource generated monthly by
MobilityData providing an overview of developments on GTFS.
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🏅 Contributor Shoutouts
As part of the GTFS Best Practices migration to the specification, MobilityData has transferred all outstanding issues and PRs to the GTFS specification repository.
Issue #421 provides a detailed explanation of the migration process and the proposed next steps. With this, we’re hoping to bring more visibility to pending Best Practices suggestions and to restart the discussion around them, so that any improvement that the community finds valuable can be carried forward.
GTFS-Flex #388The GTFS-Flex proposal allows passengers to discover demand-responsive services on trip planners; it has undergone multiple discussions and is currently being reviewed by contributors.
- Most recent GTFS-Flex Working Group Meeting held on January 17, 2024:
- Consensus on adding normalization of location_groups in a separate file
- Consensus on File name:
- locations.geojson - keep this name
- Existing location_groups.txt → location_group_stops.txt
- New normalized file → location_groups.txt
First meeting held on January 10, 2024. Items discussed:
- GTFS-TripModifications vs GTFS-NewTrips
- There’s been a consensus that the size benefits from TripModifications were big enough that we should go forward with that solution.
- Keeping a stop sequence only selector for stops or make a change to allow selection of stops with stop ids
- There was agreement that the usefulness (and ease of production) of using stop_id is strong enough that we should make the change. Transit is going to work on a concrete proposal.
The rule_priority field defines the order of priority in which matching rules are applied to legs, allowing certain rules to take precedence over others. Its presence acts as a trigger, shifting the empty semantics from "anything except" to “doesn’t affect matching”.
A mechanism to differentiate whether specific transfer rules between two legs require the use of the same fare product/media. This mechanism can distinguish between a 'ticket-based system' (i.e., a product similar to a pass) and a 'stored-value system' (i.e., a general pay-as-you-go product).
🔥 Most Active Conversations
- Phase 1 is done:
- Phase 2 is in progress:
- Voting proposal in development
Most discussions involve how the data is formatted, rather than explaining the structure itself. The suggestion is to have a clear and formal model that everyone can refer to, making discussions easier and avoiding confusion. The idea is to use tools like
dbdiagram.io to visually represent and formalize the GTFS data model.
In this discussion, Martijn asks the community for ideas on how to model some common practices in the rail industry: Train dividing, weakening and joining. Used mostly for regional or inter-urban travel, these practices consist of train cars being separated and/or coupled to serve different destinations.
Joel needs your help to answer: “Is SKIPPED stop update from a previous stop supposed to be propagated to next stops if those stops have no updates in the data?”
Evan asks the following question: “For people who produce/consume feeds with frequencies.txt that specifically follow the Frequency-based service (exact_times=0), how strictly does everyone interpret the following wording?”
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