Proposal: Adding Flex rules to the validator

[mobilitydataio]

RULES PROPOSAL

MobilityData has put together a list of validation rules that need to be added or modified now that GTFS-Flex has been adopted into the official specification. (Thanks to @westontrillium for sharing some of Trillium's rules for validating Flex feeds pre-adoption - it was extremely helpful inspiration for this proposal!)

We're seeking feedback on this proposal from the community to see if:

• Rules are missing
• There should be special considerations for particular rules
• Logic should be modified
• There are feeds we can use for testing beyond what's already been documented
• There are suggestions for how to generically refer to stops.stop_id, locations.id, and location_groups.location_group_id when they all need to be checked in 1 rule

Issues will be made to tackle these specific sections at the beginning of May once feedback is gathered and the proposal is finalized.

SCOPING & TIMELINE

Since there are 24 new rules and 3 rule modifications identified within this document, MobilityData has split up the rules into the following categories, in order of priority:

• Pre-existing rules to modify (Phase 1)
• routes.txt rules and rules affecting multiple files
• stop_times.txt rules
• locations.geojson rules
• location_groups.txt rules
• stops.txt conditionally required rules (blocked)
• booking_rules.txt rules

MobilityData commits to completing the pre-existing rule changes before the next validator release, and starting to work through the the rest of the list in the order outlined above. However, given capacity, not all rules will be added in the next release if MobilityData works on this alone.

If you and/or your organization are interested in seeing this work accelerated, you are welcome to contribute! Please let us know here if you would like to support this development effort and we can discuss next steps.

RELATED ISSUES MOBILITYDATA WILL ADDRESS

• https://github.com/MobilityData/gtfs-validator/issues/1767
• https://github.com/MobilityData/gtfs-validator/issues/1749
• https://github.com/MobilityData/gtfs-validator/issues/1750
• https://github.com/MobilityData/gtfs-validator/issues/1755

MESSAGE

GTFS-Flex [Voting ver.] (#433)
* Add 3 "location" files and booking rules file
* Modify stops.stop_id
* Modify routes.continuous_pickup/drop_off
* Modify stop_times.arrival/departure_time
* Modify stop_times.stop_id
* Add stop_times.location_group_id & location_id
* Modify stop_times.stop_sequence
* Add stop_times.start/end_pickup_drop_off_window
* Modify pickup_type & drop_off_type
* Modify stop_times.continuous_pickup/drop_off
* Add pickup/drop_off_booking_rule_id
* Add "On-demand Service Routing Behavior"
* Modify conditions for start/end_pickup_drop_off_window
* Remove unnecessary table name & editorial changes

FILES CHANGED

https://github.com/google/transit/commit/43d8bbc5bcd9feb0a53744727eca03dd0f7d8eb0

https://github.com/google/transit/commit/43d8bbc5bcd9feb0a53744727eca03dd0f7d8eb0

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