Shapes.txt in GTFS, is it needed?

[Diego Canales]

Hi Guys - We are using this tool to produce GTFS from shapefiles, but it does not produce the shapes.txt file. This file is listed as optional, so my question is what is the value of producing it, and does it impact the routing done, say by Google Transit, OTP or any other transit app? 

Thanks,

Diego

[Adrian Schönig]

Hi Diego,

shapes.txt is not needed for routing as the other files have all the relevant information. shapes.txt is mostly for making results look a lot better when plotting them on the map as the routes will can then be displayed to follow the way the service goes rather than just as straight lines between stops.

Regards,

Adrian

[John Whitlock]

This page suggests that Google will accept a feed without shapes, but that they don't recommend it, because "it is not visually appealing": 

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/transit/bestpractices.html

Also, if you do provide a shape, every stop needs to be within 30 meters of the shape, or Google will ignore it and go back to the stop-to-stop representation.

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[Michael Smith]

Yes, the shapes are not actually used for generating transit trip plans. The key issue is indeed that the User Interface is not as appealing if shapes are not provided.

But one should also keep in mind that can use GTFS to configure a CAD/AVL system and such a system won't work as well if the shapes are not provided. It is more difficult to generate accurate arrival predictions and management information if the system doesn't know exactly where the vehicles are supposed to travel. The systems can still work, but they won't work as well.

Mike

[Diego Canales]

Thanks everyone for the heads-up.

Diego

On Tuesday, September 9, 2014 1:46:08 PM UTC-4, Michael Smith wrote:

Yes, the shapes are not actually used for generating transit trip plans. The key issue is indeed that the User Interface is not as appealing if shapes are not provided.

But one should also keep in mind that can use GTFS to configure a CAD/AVL system and such a system won't work as well if the shapes are not provided. It is more difficult to generate accurate arrival predictions and management information if the system doesn't know exactly where the vehicles are supposed to travel. The systems can still work, but they won't work as well.

Mike

On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 7:14 PM, John Whitlock <John-W...@ieee.org> wrote:

This page suggests that Google will accept a feed without shapes, but that they don't recommend it, because "it is not visually appealing": 

http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/transit/bestpractices.html

Also, if you do provide a shape, every stop needs to be within 30 meters of the shape, or Google will ignore it and go back to the stop-to-stop representation.

On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Diego Canales <dcanales...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Guys - We are using this tool to produce GTFS from shapefiles, but it does not produce the shapes.txt file. This file is listed as optional, so my question is what is the value of producing it, and does it impact the routing done, say by Google Transit, OTP or any other transit app? 

Thanks,

Diego

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[Sean Barbeau]

Diego,
On a related note - in case you weren't monitoring the group emails (or for anyone who stumbles on this post in the future), there was a recent conversation on how to generate shapes.txt:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/transit-developers/EIe2dRsRWyY

Sean

[Diego Canales]

Sean,

Thanks I had seen it when revising the threads. One question related to this. If I happen to already have the routes in a shapefile (polylines), can I simply export them into a point shape and then into a csv, which would turn into my shapes.txt file? Am I correct with my reason, or would there be any caveats I should be aware of? 

Diego

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[Barbeau, Sean]

Diego,

True, if you already have the routes as polylines (which represent all your possible trips), then you should be able to simply dump this geometry for the shapes.txt file.  Only issue would be if your route shapefiles don’t represent the unique travel paths for all your trips – then you’d need a way to represent the differences.

 

Sean

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[Nisar Ahmed]

Diego,

I would first create (unless you already have them) polylines for patterns (aka variants) that represent each group of unique trips. Then any GIS software can help dump those into point shapes.

--Nisar

Sent from my iPhone

[Steven Judd]

There are also some key issues with shapefiles that must be addressed when converting shapefiles into a shapes.txt file.

1. As others have been described earlier, each unique path that your buses take (i.e. patterns, variants, etc; I will call them variants) must be mapped. There are a variety of methods of doing this, from using a directions generator loaded with all of the stops, to manually selecting road centerlines or manually drawing the path.
   
2. Concurrently, some method of tracking the direction of the variant must be captured. Google and other transit software (ex. TransitMaster and other AVLs) uses linear referencing to enable more precise tracking of bus locations and paths, and it allows for dead reckoning if such the feature exists in the system.  For shapefiles, this must be accomplished by using M aware polylines, as each individual vertex must be numbered sequentially in the correct direction of bus travel. Other solutions such as geodatabases or spatially-enabled databases are possible, but please note: "The values for shape_pt_sequence must be non-negative integers, and they must increase along the trip."
1. When using linear referencing in ArcGIS, you can accomplish this as well as the optional field of line distance by creating routes for each of the individual fields and populating the M values with distance (note that the data must be projected, and not just in a datum such as WGS 1984).
3. Every trip in your feed MUST be associated with a shape in order to illustrate the fields properly.

I have a python script for exporting M polyline shapefiles (or geodatabases, I don't remember) into GTFS format, which I will post later.

Thanks,

Steven

[Barbeau, Sean]

A quick clarification – you can do whatever projections, processing, etc. internally to generate the line, but the final shape_pt_lat and shape_pt_lon in GTFS shapes.txt must be in WGS 84.

 

Sean

[dav...@gmail.com]

Hi Steve,

Could you please post the script.

Thanks

Daniel

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[Diego Canales]

Thanks everyone for the answers.

Steve - Having access to that script would indeed be very helpful.

Diego

[Steven Judd]

Sorry guys, I've misplaced the hard drive with the files. I'll look for it and see about getting it up on Friday

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[Daniel Vivar]

Great thanks!

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[Landon Reed]

Just to pull some of the relevant bits out of Sean's previous mention of the other thread.  I wrote a tool that uses an OpenStreetMap network to generate shapes.txt from GTFS.  There are some limitations, but it works pretty well in most cases:

https://github.com/atlregional/bus-router

Great thanks!

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[rusty....@gmail.com]

Quick question.  When plotting the routes and entering lat/long points for each shape, is it necessary to plot each route from begining to end?  For example, my inbound routes differ from the outbound routes between transfer centers, so the shapes will have deviations from eachother depending on which direction the bus is travelling.  Is it more beneficial to draw overlapping lines regarding the shapes (i.e. bus travels down second street and then back up second street, resulting in two lines) or is it only necessary to chart a single path and the system determines where the bus is on the route based on designated stop times?  Am I making any sense? haha.  Thanks in advance!

[Roj Prasad]

Absolutely! Many road routes split for E & W or N & S direction so these short splits must be plotted for a nice looking view for the user's trip planning. Manually this is a pain so we automated the process.
Good Luck.

FYI: 

We developed an application that has a map layer to automatically read my plot points along a route, save to a database and generate my shapes.txt file. We developed a Transit Manager Application for GTFS from scratch. We are currently testing our client's 197 trips on the GTFS Partner Dashboard, preparing for Launch. 

Our Transit Manger for GTFS  available for licensing. The Web Epoch Transit Manager Application also powers the 35+ NY PABT KIOSK with our client's daily commuter trip schedule via XML. 

[Nandawon Tech]

Hi Landon

Do you also have a tool to generate rail routes from OSM network?

Cheers

Leo 

[Landon Reed]

Unfortunately, I don't.  The script relies on OSRM (http://project-osrm.org/) for the routing.  There may be a way to repurpose that software to draw on the rail network rather than the road network, but I haven't looked at this.

An alternative approach may be just to pull out the OSM ways for the rail network (e.g., using the Overpass API - example + resulting gist) and just construct the shapes from there.

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Landon Reed  | http://landonreed.net

@eltiar

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[sabre23t]

On Thursday, 9 October 2014 10:29:14 UTC+8, Roj Prasad wrote:

Absolutely! Many road routes split for E & W or N & S direction so these short splits must be plotted for a nice looking view for the user's trip planning. Manually this is a pain so we automated the process.

Building up a route using the directions feature in Google Maps or Google My Maps is quite easy. When you're lucky the route could just be defined by starting point and end point only. If not, adding one or two "via points" by dragging on the route will make it so. This could be saved in a My Maps directions layer, and exported to KML. The KML has <LineString> element with coordinates of all generated points on the route.

Next thing is just to get that KML into a shapes.txt format. Mmm .... anyone? ;-}

I had a look at this earlier post by Brandon https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/transit-developers/K8EfxwC-RRU referring to http://bmander.com/makeshapes/ . But that takes My Maps line elements only, doesn't take driving directions map.