GTFS/OTP for walking links within stations

[Michael Frumin]

Hi OTP folks,

I have a question that only sort of an OTP question, but which I'm fairly certain you can help me with.  The basic question is this -- how, at the intersection of OTP, GTFS data, and OSM data, should one deal with walking links within stations? 

Imagine that OSM gets you to the entrance to the station, but there is a meaningful walking/stairs/escalator distance between that station entrance and the actual train platform.  I would think that should be represented in GTFS, since it's on the transit agency's property, but as far as I'm aware GTFS doesn't really have room for non-vehicular links, does it?

Any thoughts or guidance is appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

[Stefan de Konink]

On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 3:22:55 PM CEST, Michael Frumin wrote:
> Imagine that OSM gets you to the entrance to the station, but
> there is a meaningful walking/stairs/escalator distance between
> that station entrance and the actual train platform. I would
> think that should be represented in GTFS, since it's on the
> transit agency's property, but as far as I'm aware GTFS doesn't
> really have room for non-vehicular links, does it?

Sadly it is even more complex. While in The Netherlands we are infact actively micromapping stations. It seems that some thing like not connecting the stairs, elevator or escalator to a node connected to the platform results in routing problems such islands in the data. In this case a user is unable to board a service.

Our GTFS feed is really specific, every platform has its own coordinates, so things really would require some automatic validation.

--
Met vriendelijke groet,

Stefan de Konink

[David Turner]

Take a look at the pathways.txt proposal for GTFS (it's somewhere in the
bowels of gtfs-changes). It does handle a fair amount of the necessary
information, and OTP handles some arbitrary subset of it. If any
transit agency actually published pathways.txt data, then there would be
more of an incentive to add better support to OTP.

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