GTFS-ride Adoption Challenges

[GTFS-ride]

Greetings consortium members and transit stakeholders,

We are looking to learn more about the challenges and practical considerations for adopting the GTFS-ride data standard. What challenges and practical considerations are most important to focus work upon? Also, please comment if you have information or insights related the following questions:

• Do you foresee significant challenges in connecting your ridership data to GTFS elements (e.g., trip_id, stop_id, route_id, etc.)?
• What "wow" factors would add value to your organization and help incentivize the adoption of GTFS-ride? 
• Would estimates of NTD metrics (e.g., passenger miles traveled/capita, vehicle revenue miles/capita, etc.) be a useful functionality of GTFS-ride support software and help incentivize its adoption?
• What help or assistance would your organization require to adopt the continued use of GTFS-ride?
• Are there any partnerships with other organizations that you envision could be beneficial in helping to facilitate the implementation of GTFS-ride?
• How do you see your organization using GTFS-ride?
• Does your organization have any current plans for the adoption of the GTFS-ride data standard?

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.

[GTFS-ride]

Any of our new members to the group have feedback for the GTFS-ride project team?

[Angelic Peters]

I foresee a significant challenge for rural agencies, particularly anywhere not using automatic passenger counters, to meet the needs for this project with the data that is currently exportable.

[BARNES Matthew M]

For GTFS-ride to be a practical option for smaller transit agencies (no dedicated technical staff), there is a need for software tools (GTFS-ride editor + simple analysis functionality) that compare favorably to manual spreadsheet ridership tracking and analysis practices.