nat
Hello all,
My name is Natalia, I work in the Department of Transportation in Mexico City and we have been working since last February towards building the first GTFS open feed, with the technical assistance of the World Bank. As some of you may know, transit in D.F. has two main components, one which is structured, formal, and government-led and another one which fits into the description of paratransit modes. Even though we are very excited about having this data base open to the public, we are a bit worried about leaving aside a very important element of mobility in the city, microbuses. We recognize the importance of having our information into a standardized format, yet we would like to give complete information of the transportation system, in which, unfortunately or not, microbuses play an important role: 55% of the daily trips in public transportation in DF are made by microbuses. We are aware we could “force” the microbus system to artificially fit the GTFS requirements, yet we support the idea that the format should be flexible enough to include a whole variety of transit options that has been ignored.
Mariana CS
Hi,
I’m Mariana and I’m also working in the Department of Transportation in Mexico City. Just to complement Natalia’s comment, I would like to add that GTFS spec as it is, it’s not only making us leave aside the informal part of the transportation system, but to “disguise”one of our formal and very popular systems, the BRT called Metrobús. We had to adapt it and represent it as an express bus, which might sound similar enough, but is clear evidence that GTFS as it is, needs to evolve.
We think the main barrier to represent the microbuses is the stop-based routes, as microbuses don’t have fixed stops and of course, no fixed schedule, and adapting this system into GTFS would be very risky in terms of reliability of the information we would like to provide. We would be very interested to know which sorts of barriers you see in the spec, so that we can collectively suggest some changes that take into account the way in which public transport operates in different contexts.
Emily Jean Eros
[1] Ajay Kumar and Fanny Barrett, Stuck in Traffic: Urban Transport in Africa, Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (The World Bank, January 2008), http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTAFRSUBSAHTRA/Resources/Stuck-in-Traffic.pdf.
[2] Corporación Andina de Fomento, Observatorio de Movilidad Urbana para América Latina (Corporación Andina de Fomento, 2010). Mode shares calculated from the number of each type of transit vehicle multiplied by the estimated capacity of each vehicle.
[3] LTA Academy of Singapore, “Passenger Transport Mode Shares in World Cities,” JOURNEYS: Sharing Urban Transport Solutions no. 7 (November 2011): 1–11.
[4] Robert Cervero and Aaron Golub, “Informal Transport: A Global Perspective,” Transport Policy 14, no. 6 (November 2007): 445–457, doi:10.1016/j.tranpol.2007.04.011.
[5] Peter Wilkinson, “‘Formalising’ Paratransit Operations in African Cities: Constructing a Research Agenda,” in Proceedings of the 27th Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2008) (presented at the Southern African Transport Conference, Pretoria, South Africa, 2008), http://137.215.9.22/bitstream/handle/2263/6390/Wilkinson.pdf?sequence=1.
[6] Carolina Gonçalves Pereira et al., “Paratransit Regulation in Rio de Janeiro: A Comparison of Two Surveys” (presented at the 9th Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Transport (Thredbo 9), Lisbon, Portugal: Elevier/Emerald, 2005), 1–13, http://www.civil.ist.utl.pt/thredbo9/proceedings/proceedings/Tuesday/WSD/3rd_Session/1038.pdf.--
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