Carpooling ?

[Frisco]

Hi,

I'm new and I'm discovering Open Trip Planner.
I would like your opinion on that subject : do you think it would be possible to match Open Trip Planner with a simple carpooling system, adding carpooling trips as another mode of transportation (like bike, bus etc.) ?

Thanks in advance for your replies

[flo]

carpooling is a means of (people-powered) transport.
It is probably the most dynamic mode on the spectrum,
as routes and stops can be flexibly adapted on demand.
Public transit on the other end of the spectrum is rather static,
i.e. timetables are scheduled long in advance and seldom changed.

Aggregating and integrating multiple modes makes obviously sense.
I'm curious on your thoughts how that could be achieved technically?

flo

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[Andrew Byrd]

We have discussed using OTP for informal / unscheduled transport before.
Path searches can certainly be a useful component in such systems. I am
not clear on what specific role do you want OTP to play in carpooling --
helping people find co-workers nearby for carpooling, helping plan
routes to efficiently pick up or drop off other carpoolers?

-Andrew

[Thorsten]

Hi Frisco,

there is a mature but not active open source Carpooling project called OpenRide

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openride/

http://open-ride.com/en/

http://www.open-ride.mobi/OpenRideServer-RS/view/

Have tested it and works very well, but is not multi language yet

Thorsten

[Frisco]

Hi Thorsten,

I didn't know about this project. It seems really interesting. I barely speak German though ;)
Thanks for the info !

[Frisco]

Hi Andrew, flo

The idea is to "plan routes to efficiently pick up or drop off other carpoolers".
In my idea, there would be a carpooling web service, where you can register, publish trips and get in contact... and OTP would provide the search engine : alerting you if there are carsharing opportunities and helping you to find the available public transport solutions to finish your trip.

I read that OTP could give real-time info (GFTS RT), and I saw that OTP was able to plan trips like car + bus or else... so I thought maybe there could be an alert telling you that there are carsharing opportunities and linking you to the carpooling service for further info and contact.
I hope you understand what I mean.

[Andrew Byrd]

On 03/12/2013 07:55 PM, Frisco wrote:
> Hi Andrew, flo
>
> The idea is to "plan routes to efficiently pick up or drop off other
> carpoolers".

If (1) the system's user is a driver who wants to pick up potential
carpoolers, and the locations of potential carpoolers are known, then
this is the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), which OTP supports for
non-transit routing.

If (2) the system's user is a rider who wants to know how to reach the
closest point on a fixed driving route via public transit, this is also
doable but would require a relatively simple API extension.

> In my idea, there would be a carpooling web service, where you can
> register, publish trips and get in contact... and OTP would provide the
> search engine : alerting you if there are carsharing opportunities and
> helping you to find the available public transport solutions to finish
> your trip.

This is plausible. Considering case (1) TSP is an "NP-hard" problem,
i.e. really time consuming. You'd probably need to narrow down the list
of candidate riders before planning the route.

In case (2) you just need to do common trip plans.

Optimizing for both driver and rider at once would be a very interesting
problem, but would require significant modifications to OTP and is
beyond its current capabilities.

> I read that OTP could give real-time info (GFTS RT), and I saw that OTP
> was able to plan trips like car + bus or else... so I thought maybe
> there could be an alert telling you that there are carsharing
> opportunities and linking you to the carpooling service for further info
> and contact.
> I hope you understand what I mean.

If all drivers' planned paths are known and fixed, they could be treated
as a temporary routes that allow alighting at any point. OTP does not
currently handle adding arbitrary routes to a running server or
alighting at arbitrary points along the route, but at least the second
feature is on our to-do list because it is a characteristic of many
informal transit systems.

-Andrew

[Frisco]

Thank you Andrew for your quick replies and all the details you gave to me. I apologize in advance because my knowledge is limited and thus my understanding is also.

From what I understand  (you tell me if I'm still lost, I would stop asking), maybe I'm complicating things thinking of adding carpooling offers to OTP.

Would it be possible to integrate OTP to a carpooling system using the API ?
It would be case 2 (?) : I imagine that I place an ad on the carpooling website and that it would tell me if there are other carpoolers or if I can get a public transit solution instead.

Am I completely off base ?

By the way, OTP is a very exciting project, much easier to use than many other trip planners I tried.

[Andrew Byrd]

On 03/13/2013 08:32 PM, Frisco wrote:
> Would it be possible to integrate OTP to a carpooling system using the API ?

I think you'll need to more tightly define the service to know how OTP
fits in. Whatever the case, yes, the purpose of the API is to integrate
OTP into larger systems. APIs are standardized interfaces between
modules. Just as in other engineering domains, they allow you to break
the problem into pieces that don't overwhelm a mind or a team. You can
choose to see OTP as a sort of opaque box that will provide you with
driving or transit directions as requested.

> It would be case 2 (?) : I imagine that I place an ad on the carpooling
> website and that it would tell me if there are other carpoolers or if I
> can get a public transit solution instead.

The problem is that the route of the carpool driver is not necessarily
fixed -- it can deviate to make life easier for a carpool rider.

Perhaps when you say carpooling you are thinking of long-distance
carpooling (say from one country or region to another)? In that case the
driver could choose several different routes, even stopping in a
different city to pick someone up.

The same applies within a city -- the driver can take a different road,
stop in a different neighborhood. When you add multiple carpoolers and
the possibility of a driver picking up 2 or more passengers the
optimization problem gets tricky.

> By the way, OTP is a very exciting project**, much easier to use than

> many other trip planners I tried.

Thanks! Good to hear since we are currently having a discussion about
how to reduce the complexity of configuration and deployment :)

-Andrew

[Antonio Bucchiarone]

Hi Guys, 

is there any open source project that I can test that is using carpooling mean in OTP? Any suggestion?