
Bay Area Regional GTFS Feed: 31 transit agency feeds together in one API - wuster
https://www.interline.io/blog/mtc-regional-gtfs-feed-release/
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paxys
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??

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opportune
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.

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BorgHunter
> 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.

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derefr
> 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?

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iudqnolq
What happens when the business govt wants low corp tax, and the residents govt
wants high corp tax to fund programs? What happens when they disagree over
zoning, ie which side gets to build somewhere?

I don't think you can segment that way.

One related idea that might work a little better (I think it comes from
libertarian circles, can't remember exactly where) is representation by
profession. So eg _x_ % of the legislature is elected by residents, and other
percentages by other groups like business people.

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mehhh
Representation by industry has worked really poorly for Hong Kong, its a key
part of why they have the majority of thr population protesting and demanding
real democracy, not the corporate controlled legislature that currently
presides over HK.

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iudqnolq
Thank you for letting me know, I didn't realize it had actually been tried. It
appears to have also gone poorly in Taiwan. I absolutely didn't intent to say
it was a good idea, merely that it was a similar idea to the parent's that
might work a little better.

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lilyball
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.

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et-al
Fun fact: GTFS used to be _Google_ Transit Feed Specification:

[https://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/01/05/how-google-and-
portlan...](https://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/01/05/how-google-and-portlands-
trimet-set-the-standard-for-open-transit-data/)

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jnathsf
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aftbit
I just tried to sign up and got directed here: [https://511.org/open-
data/transit](https://511.org/open-data/transit)

It looks like the bulk data feeds are available but the APIs are not. I am
particularly interested in:

    
    
        Real-time Vehicle Monitoring (SIRI)
        Real-time Vehicle Monitoring API provides information about current location and expected activities of a vehicle in XML and JSON formats.
    
        Endpoint: http://api.511.org/transit/TBD
        Allowable parameters: api_key (mandatory) and TBD
    

Also, looks like there's an error in "GTFS-Realtime Vehicle Positions"
description - it claims:

    
    
        GTFS-Realtime Trip Updates provides real-time updates on the vehicle positions for an agency in the Protocol Buffer format.

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pabs3
I note that OpenStreetMap apparently has tags for mapping between OSM nodes
and GTFS. I wonder how much GTFS data gets imported into OSM.

[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/General_Transit_Feed_Spe...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/General_Transit_Feed_Specification)

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BooneJS
No ACE train?

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drewda
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]

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robbi5
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](https://github.com/ad-
freiburg/pfaedle)

~~~
drewda
Nice. Thanks for sharing.

For what it's worth, this would bring ODbL-licensed data into an output GTFS
feed.

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johnl1479
Curious why the line to Sacramento (upper right) is considered the Bay Area.

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rickety-gherkin
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.

