[Talk-us] Portland, Oregon & surrounding areas - OSM

[Hillsman, Edward]

On Sun, 01 May 2011, Mike N wrote:

>This is a very interesting project.  I recently began mapping and 
>entering the local bus routes (which even Google doesn't have, courtesy 
>of our local "closed data" policies).   I realized that my work is still 
>useless to the general community because the OSM doesn't have a way to 
>enter the schedule, and public transport schedules appear to be unwanted 
>data.
>
>   Where is the OpenTripPlanner's schedule data stored?   Is there any 
>way to get an early copy of OpenTripPlanner to work with it?
>
>   Thanks,

Hi Mike,

The schedule information comes from the transit agency's GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification), which is an open data standard that transit agencies use to make their data available to Google for use by Google Transit. One of my colleagues and I have just finished a draft report that discusses this, and as soon as the final report has been accepted by the Florida Department of Transportation, which sponsored the work, we will post the report on our website and link to it from the research page of the OSM wiki.

In a nutshell, we concluded that it makes sense to use GTFS for the transit schedule and route information, OSM for streets/sidewalks/bicycling infrastructure, and link the two sources using the bus stops, which appear in both. The folks developing the OpenTripPlanner had already figured this out, and we think it makes a great deal of sense. Not all agencies have put their data into GTFS format, but more than 130 have done so in the US, and another 300 in other countries. As yet, there is no single, comprehensive list of which ones have done so.

Ed

Edward L. Hillsman, Ph.D.
Senior Research Associate
Center for Urban Transportation Research
University of South Florida
4202 Fowler Ave., CUT100
Tampa, FL  33620-5375
813-974-2977 (tel)
813-974-5168 (fax)
hillsman at cutr.usf.edu
http://www.cutr.usf.edu