[HN Gopher] Bay Area Regional GTFS Feed: 31 transit agency feeds...
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Bay Area Regional GTFS Feed: 31 transit agency feeds together in
one API
Author : wuster
Score : 85 points
Date : 2020-01-09 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.interline.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.interline.io)
| paxys wrote:
| On one hand, this is a great effort and I'm sure will help
| commuters a ton.
|
| But on the other, why on earth does the bay area have 31+
| different transit agencies??
| Domenic_S wrote:
| This is exactly the problem. It's so inefficient. 31+
| executives (and top-paid people), 31+ budgets, 31+ locally-
| optimized goals and preferences. It's completely nuts.
| mc32 wrote:
| Agreed. They need to merge and coordinate agencies. Someone
| like abag could become the MTA or the ny-nj port authority.
| romwell wrote:
| To ensure that we will never have a viable public
| transportation network that can make high-density mixed-use
| walkable urban environments possible.
| et-al wrote:
| Google Maps and the Transit App already ingest GTFS feeds for
| trip routing and predicting arrivals.
|
| A regional feed would make things easier for developers, not so
| much commuters, who are already relying on aforementioned
| products.
|
| For anyone interested in playing with GTFS feeds in their area,
| I recommend checking out TransitFeeds' list:
| https://transitfeeds.com/feeds
| opportune wrote:
| If it actually worked well, people might use it, especially the
| undesirables.
|
| It's also because the Bay Area is stupidly split up into dozens
| and dozens of small-medium sized municipalities spread over
| multiple counties. So every little group acts in their own
| locally optimal, shortsighted interests. Most of the people
| affected worst by the lack of public transportation and housing
| can't vote in the areas that can actually fix the problem.
|
| I've been thinking the past couple of years you should be able
| to vote in local elections in the area you work in, even if you
| don't live there.
| dmead wrote:
| literally everyone who commutes into a city for work wants to
| also vote there. good luck with that.
| jcims wrote:
| >I've been thinking the past couple of years you should be
| able to vote in local elections in the area you work in, even
| if you don't live there.
|
| Makes sense to me, especially if you are paying local income
| taxes in that area. I seem to recall from high school that
| 'taxation without representation' caused a big kerfluffle a
| couple hundred years ago.
| opportune wrote:
| I don't think there are local income taxes (at least
| visible to the employee) but they are IMO a part of the
| community, pay taxes indirectly (property taxes where they
| work, sales taxes, etc.) and should have a say because of
| that.
| jcims wrote:
| Ahh, maybe in CA. In Ohio you have to pay income taxes
| where you work and where you live. If they are different
| places then there are usually some kind of weird commuter
| credits that never actually offset the difference.
| BorgHunter wrote:
| > I've been thinking the past couple of years you should be
| able to vote in local elections in the area you work in, even
| if you don't live there.
|
| In many areas this would effectively lead to the suburbs
| being able to dictate urban policy to the inner city, where
| suburban commuter interests like parking override the
| interests of the actual residents. The 1998 amalgamation of
| Toronto is a good example of this happening, and I think a
| lot of Old Toronto voters are quite unhappy with this, given
| how it led to mayors like Rob Ford who would never have been
| elected with the old boundaries.
|
| Other areas try to solve this by creating an uber transit
| authority which theoretically directs and coordinates the
| smaller agencies for the greater regional good. A good
| example of this is the Regional Transportation Authority in
| Chicago. It often doesn't work out the way it's intended (in
| Chicago, the CTA [city proper transit] and Metra [commuter
| rail] still have very poor coordination, although Pace
| [suburban buses] and CTA do have somewhat good coordination).
|
| A third approach is to (try to) make the whole region's
| transit the responsibility of one single agency. Picking
| Atlanta as an example here (MARTA), it tends to lead to
| affluent suburbs (Cobb and Gwinnett Counties) trying to stay
| out of the system because of concerns like "transit brings
| crime" and "it's too expensive and no one will use it" and
| other assorted nonsense. So that approach has its problems
| too.
|
| In short, this is a very thorny problem and there honestly
| aren't a lot of places in North America that do it very well,
| although some are worse than others (the SF Bay Area may seem
| like a mess, and it is, but it's inarguably better than the
| dozens of barely-funded, not-at-all-sufficient systems that
| exist in most large and medium cities in the U.S.). I think
| the right solution is probably specific to each region and it
| still won't solve every problem, at least not without a level
| of funding that transit simply does not get on this
| continent.
| derefr wrote:
| > In many areas this would effectively lead to the suburbs
| being able to dictate urban policy to the inner city
|
| Then perhaps "urban policy" is an unnatural category,
| combining conflicting interests.
|
| Why not just have _two_ municipal governments--one elected
| by those whose business interests lie within the city,
| which would be in charge of the city 's _business_ policy
| (e.g. corporate taxe and grants, arterial infrastructure,
| commercial zoning); and a separate one, elected by the city
| 's urban residents, which would be in charge of the city's
| _civic_ policy (e.g. estate taxes and VATs, non-arterial
| infrastructure, residential zoning, etc.)? These are
| essentially orthogonal problems that don 't really "run
| into" each-other much; you could have two separate sets of
| people working on solving them without those groups needing
| to communicate all that much.
|
| Municipal government is already _somewhat_ factored this
| way, insofar as e.g. school boards and park boards are
| separately elected rather than being appointments of the
| municipal executive; and some of those elections are
| defined by different political boundaries (e.g. catchment
| areas for schools) than the election of the municipal
| executive is. Why not just go one step further?
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Good point. And I would like to also point out that this is
| another example of the Valley fixing its own problems instead
| of problems we all share. All we ever hear outside of the
| Valley is how the Valley is going to save us.
|
| And yes, there is a lot of troll in that comment :P.
| forwhomst wrote:
| To fix this support https://www.seamlessbayarea.org/
| mullen wrote:
| Because there is no Emperor of California who can come through,
| with a single stroke and merge agencies together. Once those
| agencies were created, they were never going to be merged with
| other agency.
| unlinked_dll wrote:
| - Nine counties
|
| - 7,000m^2
|
| - 7.75 million people
|
| - 101 municipal governments
|
| Shocking that we only have 31+ transit agencies. The place is
| dense!
| johnl1479 wrote:
| Curious why the line to Sacramento (upper right) is considered
| the Bay Area.
| mjg59 wrote:
| The Capitol Corridor runs through the East Bay to San Jose, so
| it's used by a number of bay area commuters.
| rickety-gherkin wrote:
| I think because it's an everyday commuter line. Unfortunately
| there are really limited options but I do know a few people
| that make the commute.
| lilyball wrote:
| The article didn't explain what a GTFS feed was, and my first
| thought was it's a "Get The Fuck Somewhere feed". Turns out it's
| General Transit Feed Specification.
| bytematic wrote:
| It has all the bus stops and times for applications to use.
| Metros usually generate them to send to google for their app
| but they sometimes also publish them online for people to use.
| paxys wrote:
| I like yours better
| et-al wrote:
| Fun fact: GTFS used to be _Google_ Transit Feed Specification:
|
| https://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/01/05/how-google-and-portlan...
| BooneJS wrote:
| No ACE train?
| drewda wrote:
| Sharp eyes!
|
| ACE is included in the feed, but we did not include it in the
| animation. We don't currently have geometries for the route
| alignment (the train tracks), so we'd be drawing straight lines
| between the ACE stops -- didn't look that great in the GIF, so
| we left it out.
|
| [Note: I'm an Interline staffer]
| dublinben wrote:
| OpenStreetMap appears to have the geometry of this rail line:
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2845552
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9599549
| java-man wrote:
| Send an intern with a logging GPS?
| robbi5 wrote:
| If you want a quite fast and nice solution for aligning
| routes, pfaedle[1] is a great tool that creates a gtfs
| shapes.txt by using open street map train track / street
| data.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/ad-freiburg/pfaedle
| drewda wrote:
| Nice. Thanks for sharing.
|
| For what it's worth, this would bring ODbL-licensed data
| into an output GTFS feed.
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(page generated 2020-01-09 23:00 UTC)