Welcome to the GTFS Flexible Transit Working Group!

[Aaron Antrim]

This group is to facilitate communication for the effort to add capabilities to describe flexible services for the purposes of service discovery and trip planning.  To this point, there has been discussion on the gtfs-changes list as well as various person-to-person conversations.  The purpose of this group is to consolidate these various conversations in an open log.

Just to clarify, I do not expect to play a role as moderator or facilitator going forward.  There are many leaders from various projects that are in an ideal position to guide the effort and discussion.

Here is a proposed process for this working group:

1. Publicize this group to invite organizations and individuals with an interest to participate.

2. Survey existing discussions to leverage prior work.  Luckily for all of us, this is already Denis Haskin has helpfully summarized GTFS flexible transit proposals and discussions to date: https://github.com/camsys/1click/wiki/State-of-paratransit,-DRT,-flexible-routes,-etc-for-GTFS

3. Do a survey of various flexible transit services to determine the various service features that need to be represented in a Spec addition.  This has been started in a Google Doc that several people have contributed to: https://docs.google.com/a/trilliumtransit.com/document/d/1hB5ItKLWRtMQ4Iuap9wk9NwvzQRC7LQVPht_9oySO2M/edit#heading=h.n3hp8rw2t1ua

4. Develop a draft specification that can represent the various transit services we survey in step #3.  Share this draft spec with this working group and gtfs-changes for feedback.

5. Iterate step #4 based on feedback.

6. Find, develop, and support software that creates and utilizes GTFS data based on the draft GTFS proposal(s).

This will be a major milestone for GTFS.  Onwards… to much useful discussion and development, I’m sure.