Make a tool to assess schedule adherence

[mmorang]

Collect gtfs-rt over a period of time and compare it with the schedule data to highlight areas where the schedule needs work (and possibly export a corrected schedule back out to GTFS). Let's close the feedback loop!

Do you want a tool like this? If you work for a transit agency and are interested in studying schedule adherence, I would love to talk to you. Please contact me.

[mmorang]

From some preliminary research, it looks like the Vehicle Positions portion of the GTFS-rt feeds would be the most relevant, if they can be recorded over time. It contains far more information than I initially assumed, though it's not clear how many agencies actually populate all that information.

For accessing the feeds through python, this will be helpful: https://github.com/google/gtfs-realtime-bindings/tree/master/python

[mmorang]

For future reference, for messing around with installing python packages:

• To download the VirtualEnv package that works with Python 2.7, get the latest .tar.gz file from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv and unzip using 7-zip.
• Then to create a new virtualenv called “env” in a folder called “test” with access to global site packages (in case you need to use arcpy): <Path to python.exe> "E:\PyPlay\virtualenv-15.1.0\virtualenv.py" test\env –system-site-packages
• Always remember to activate the virtualenv before using it. test\env\scripts\activate.bat
• Then you can run pip to get the package in your virtualenv

[d-wasserman]

As previously discussed, I could see a use case for this. As you noted, the information inside of a real time GTFS feed is potentially very dense (schedule adherence and other info). I think the historical component (over a week or month) could be good for speed/reliability analysis.