On-demand transportation services feed for multimodal routing apps

[Robert Seidl]

Hello all,

I hope this question makes sense on this group...

There are now a number of third party apps (in addition to google maps of course) making good use of GTFS feeds.

The number of "semi public"  / shared resource or "on demand transport" companies out there is exploding. 

ZipCar (Avis), Car2go (mercedes), DriveNow (BMW), Hertz OnDemand are examples. 

Inner city Bike rentals, already very common in Europe are now also expanding in the US (NYC citibike, SF has scootNetworks etc).

They are all somewhat similar in that they have pickup/dropoff points, an inventory at a certain point & time, and cost rules about driving (by time, km etc.)

The model is probably sufficiently different from regular public transport (trams, trans, buses) to not "squeeze" it into regular GTFS. But would it not make sense to spec and provide feeds for these services also ?

Multimodal routing apps like Nimbler could take advantage of those feeds by providing trip transitions to on-demand transport services you are a member of (or even suggest convenient ones that you are not a member of yet) Especially in the US where we often have far lower density than in European cities, on-demand transport may provide coverage where there just is no or very little public transportation.  Dana Goldin of BMW's DriveNow brings up exactly this use case as an example: take the caltrain from San Francisco to Palo Alto then hop into a DriveNow BMW to get to your meeting in Silicon Valley.

I would imagine that the on-demand services would not object to having such feeds, on the contrary, they may provide advertising and reach that might otherwise be much more expensive.

A reservation mechanism would also be useful because you want to be able to "secure a ride" once your routing app found a good one. I think a URL mechanism that links to each service's reservation site, with the appropriate "rent resource X at location Y at time Z for duration W" data attached in the URL would allow each service to keep control of member accounts, branding, and reservation mechanism yet reduce the amount of "typing hassle" for the user.

So, anyway, I wonder whether such an effort would make sense, and I would invite the GTFS gurus, and representatives of ride share services and routing applications to provide their views on this.

Robert Seidl

PS: what the feed might contain:

resource types

   examples: for bike on demand: bike, tandem, for car on demand: Prius Hybrid, Ford Focus, etc.

location

   pickup/dropoff locations, opening times, tel nrs

inventory per location (at a particular time in future)

   (ouch does this make it harder because unlike GTFS feeds this changes per date/time and so needs a query back to the server ?)

cost structure

   hairy but not any hairier than public transport 

reservation URL

   on mobiles, start the appropriate app (eg zipcar, scoot, drivenow) and 

   have reservation location, date/time, resource type, duration etc. all filled in already.

PS2: I think that true ride-sharing services like ZimRides, SideCar or taxi like services such as Lyft, Uber, or personal rentals like relayrides or FlightCar probably are too different to fit the above model, but perhaps I am wrong.

PS3: parking resources (parking garages and lots - availability and reservations) would actually fit this model quite well, why is there no common parking feed spec :) ?

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Robert Seidl

http://www.transportationtechnologyventures.com/blog

Twitter @T_T_V_