eskerda
Add OV Fiets (#309)
fix #309
Hi @eskerda @ewooonk,
As mentioned in #309 and #499 I'd like to add the Dutch bike sharing provider OV Fiets (owned by Nederlandse Spoorwegen the national Railways in the Netherlands).
As previously mentioned GBFS for OV Fiets are available at https://gbfs.openov.nl/ovfiets. The stations feature a region_id attribute. Fetching stations (grouped) by 'regions' is unfortunately not possible. Furthermore those regions don't (always) match the (nearest) cities. So manual re-grouping was needed after parsing the data from http://fiets.openov.nl/locaties.json and matching it against the actual stations in https://gbfs.openov.nl/ovfiets/station_status.json.
Regards,
Jean-Luc
Hello @eUgEntOptIc44 , thanks for the patch. So the reason for not using the regular GBFS parser is that the systems are not logically grouped then?
I see there are many instances with only one to three stations, is that correct?
@eskerda OV-fiets is different compared to many other bike shares since the bikes are mainly used for return trips. Returning to a different location is possible but discouraged by a €10,- charge. One railway station (like Utrecht CS) might have multiple bicycle parkings with OV-fiets availability.
Recently OV-fiets started with electric bikes as well. This are listed as separate stations (e.g. OV-ebike Driebergen-Zeist). Although the API doesn't seem to use the form_factor attribute yet,
@ewooonk thanks for the insights. I have to admit that working on this task before ever using a OV fiet was a bit challenging. The Dutch non-profit Stichting OpenGeo (see openov.nl) does provide the GBFS feeds and other helpful resources. However the contents are unfortunately mostly written in Dutch.
@eskerda thanks for reviewing this PR
Is there anything left do to from my side before this PR is ready to merge? Should I reverse the re-grouping of the stations and use the regular GBFS parser?
A few months have past since my last message. I'd be very grateful if @eskerda could look into this any time soon and provide me with a short update.
Are the general endpoints working for you? I am getting empty responses
I am very thankful for this contribution, but at the same time I am very wary of adding a system with many networks and not much stations. Maybe we could filter only the interesting cities? What logic did you apply to do the grouping?
Thanks
I unfortunately have to confirm that right now all openov gbfs endpoints return empty data for me as well. Might need to stop this for now. I just read in their google group that the python parser used on their side apparently is quite unstable since at least july 2022.