[Talk-transit] Naming concepts

Greg Troxel gdt at lexort.com
Mon Oct 31 12:54:22 UTC 2016


Felix Delattre <felix-lists at delattre.de> writes:

> I also like them. Thanks, Jo!
> But isn't "line" an European wording? Would an English native speaker
> intuitively understand the concepts of "line" and "itinerary"? I always

For me (en_US), I find it awkward.

> thought a "line" is more likely to understand as a network or public
> transport operator for US boys and girls - but (hopefully) I might be wrong.

"line" often refers to a company that operates routes, like a "cruise
line".

itinerary is usually a set of places that a person or group is going to,
often including cities/hotels on multi-day trips and sometimes including
flights.   If someone said "please send me your itinerary for your trip
to France" they would expect a list of "this night we are at this hotel,
address and phone, and this night....".

I'm still not 100% following.  In the wiki table, is concept number 1
just a name for the collection of route variants, and basically the name
that the bus company (agency/whatever) uses?  I would call that
"bus_route_name" then, with a name, and perhaps bus_route_ref for just
the numberish part, along with bus_route_operator.  This is making it
like highway ref tags.

I think "route_variant" is a good name, in that it captures the sense
that all of the route_variants of a route are similar somewhow but not
quite.   The only awkwardness is that sometimes there will be only one
route_variant in a route.

trip and itinerary are both confusing in that there is ambiguity between
a specific one-time departure (e.g., 0800 from Harvard Square on 31
October 2016) and a planned recurring departure (0800 from Harvard
Square on all weekdays).   I would use the terms

  recurring_trip

  specific_trip

but don't really like the second one.


Overall, though, I would try very hard to just reuse the GTFS terms for
the GTFS concepts, and to put a comment in the source or docs clarifying
what they mean.  I think the benefit of clearer terms will be outweighed
by having more to learn.


Finally, I think osm2gtfs is going to want to use information that isn't
in OSM.   I'm not sure what the plan is, or if one can produce a GTFS
version that is just missing the fine-grained schedule information, and
if that's what you want to do.

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