Detecting skipped stations

[Ingrid W]

Hi, it seems that some skipped stations still have arrival times listed in the realtime feeds. For example, southbound Q trains are skipping Church Av, but there is still a StopTimeUpdate returned for that stop. It also appears in the supplemented GTFS stop_times.txt. Example trip_id from today: L0S5-Q-2022-S20_081900_Q..S60X003 lists D28S (Church Av).

Am I missing something? How can we detect this situation?

Thank you!

[Dillon Shen-Cruz]

Hi Ingrid,

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention — we’re looking into it. Our GTFS-RT feed sometimes doesn’t suppress an arrival when a train is slated to skip a stop. Unfortunately, there is no way for third-party developers to circumvent this at the moment.

Thank you for your patience as we look into this issue.

Dillon

[Ingrid W]

Hi Dillon, any update on this or suggestions on how to handle these cases? For the Church Av example, I noticed that some third parties like Apple Maps do handle this correctly.

[Dillon Shen-Cruz]

Hi Ingrid, we appreciate the follow-up. This issue is on our roadmap, but it'll take a while to resolve this internally. Until then, I think the only approach is to manually suppress skipped stops based on planned work as it is announced, which you can find in our Service Alerts feed: https://api.mta.info/#/serviceAlerts.