GTFS-ride
Greetings consortium members and transit stakeholders,
It was great to see some of you and discuss GTFS-ride at the recent transit conferences in Bend and Napa. In efforts to keep the conversation going, please take this opportunity to engage in the development and adoption of the GTFS-ride data standard.
This thread focuses on the issues surrounding logistics and technical challenges with the GTFS-ride standard. More specifically, please comment if you have information or opinions related to the following issues:
- There is a concern about GTFS-ride creating large files, especially in the case of the following:
o Large volumes of stop-level data in board_alight.txt.
o When many base GTFS feeds are needed to cover a time range of ridership data due to frequent republishing of GTFS.
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- There has been interest expressed in adding fields for the option to provide summarized data (e.g., averages, std. dev., samples size, etc.) or processed data (e.g., estimated, extrapolated, cleaned, truncated, etc.) as opposed to only total counts.
o What technical challenges would you foresee in implementing such fields?
o What metadata fields would be desired to put any reported ridership into proper context?
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- There is a recurring technical issue in making connections between ridership data (as it currently exists at agencies) and the required GTFS IDs (e.g., route_id, stop_id, trip_id, stop_sequence).
o How much of a challenge would this be for your agency and staff?
o What are your ideas for solutions to the issue, generalizable or unique?
o What GTFS best practices could be adopted to make this transition easier?
Also, please see the outstanding issues on the GTFS-ride GitHub repository here: https://github.com/ODOT-PTS/GTFS-ride/issues. Many of these issues are also open technical challenges. If you have another concern or recommendation for the standard, we invite you to start a new issue or pull request in the GitHub repository.
The GTFS-ride project team highly values your feedback and feels these discussion threads will help engage the stakeholder community and further the development of the GTFS-ride data standard.