Sharing and Reporting in GTFS-ride

[GTFS-ride]

Good Morning GTFS-ride Google Group,

This is the final discussion topic post stemming from the Consortium Group webinar meetings. This discussion focuses on the topic of sharing and reporting GTFS-ride datasets. Please comment if you have information or opinions related to the following:

• As previously mentioned, there have been concerns expressed about sharing GTFS-ride data.
• Do you have concerns about sharing GTFS-ride data? In whole, or in part? 
• If you have concerns, what parts of a GTFS-ride feed would be helpful to be made public, and which may be best kept private? 
• Would adopting GTFS-ride help you to share internally developed tools more broadly?
• What are your organization’s thoughts and attitudes towards open source tools and open data sharing? 
• What are your thoughts about how GTFS-ride data could potentially integrate with and/or ease NDT reporting?
• What are your ideas on how to advance the value of GTFS-ride for NTD reporting?
• What challenges may arise from potentially large file sizes of GTFS-ride datasets? 

Feel free to provide any feedback or comments that you think are relevant to this topic. If you have a specific concern or recommendation for the standard, we invite you to start an issue or pull request in the GitHub repository.

In addition, there is still a chance for consortium members to offer their thoughts on the following past discussion posts:

Logistics and Technical Challenges
Analysis and Planning Opportunities
GTFS-ride Adoption Challenges
Data Quality in GTFS-ride
Commercial Interests in GTFS-ride
Privacy Issues in GTFS-ride

We greatly appreciate the involvement and participation of different transit communities in helping to improve and promote the GTFS-ride data standard.

[andrew...@ltd.org]

• As previously mentioned, there have been concerns expressed about sharing GTFS-ride data.
• Do you have concerns about sharing GTFS-ride data? In whole, or in part?
  
• If you have concerns, what parts of a GTFS-ride feed would be helpful to be made public, and which may be best kept private? 

I don't think that LTD has serious concerns about sharing most of our data. Part of that is based on what we are currently collecting. We will soon be implementing an electronic fare collection system. Once this is in place, we may have more concerns. We have already identified that we do not want to share our customer ridership information, which is one of the files in the GTFS-ride standard. Obviously the ability to link rider trips to service is important, but it's not something we would want to publish externally at a disaggregate level. Overall, most of our records are subject to records requests and we are willing to share the information. In my work specifically, we are trying to put more of our information online before we get requests to cut down on headaches for ourselves and our public when they have to go through a request process to get at the information that they are ultimately entitled to.

• Would adopting GTFS-ride help you to share internally developed tools more broadly?

I think if GTFS-ride tools were developed, some of our stakeholders would certainly want us to share the information in this format. One of the challenges we face currently is the format that we can share ridership information in. Every request ends up being a semi-custom data dump to the person who requested it. Having a widely accepted standard would allow us to be more consistent about what is published and to share that more broadly once we have created the files.

• What are your organization’s thoughts and attitudes towards open source tools and open data sharing? 

As I mentioned above, at least some individuals at LTD are starting to talk about publishing our information more broadly in an effort to avoid the burden of having more requests for data. We are required to provide almost anything we have to the public, so publishing it rather than making people do a records request seems to make sense to me, particularly for information like ridership numbers.

• What are your thoughts about how GTFS-ride data could potentially integrate with and/or ease NTD reporting?

I'm not sure how it could help us. LTD reports many different modes and not all of our data gets put into the same database depending on which service it was collected from. We may be unique in that aspect, but I can't say. We already have a fairly extensive back-end set up of views and tables to help us report NTD. Any problems we have would not be related to the format that we are collecting and then reading the data from.

• What are your ideas on how to advance the value of GTFS-ride for NTD reporting?
• What challenges may arise from potentially large file sizes of GTFS-ride datasets? 

I think generating and processing the data sets may end up being a challenge. LTD collects very disaggregate ridership data and will soon have more data from our electronic fare system to join to our APC and AVL data. I worry that once it becomes public knowledge that we can provide very specific types of information for basically any date range, people will expect us to regularly publish all of that. That will end up being a very large amount of data for us to process and store for a relatively small amount of people to look through. Some level of aggregation will be necessary for any kind of regular publication of our data to control the size of files.