Creating an animated gif of public transport networks using GTFS data

Collaborative mapping of paratransit and GTFS data

Jacqueline Klopp (Twitter) and Clemence Cavoli (Twitter) have a new paper reviewing some trends in transportation planning in African cities with a focus on paratransit. The paper also discusses why official transportation planning should engage with paratransit services and how this task can be supported through collaborative mapping projects that open new avenues for data accountability.

The paper is open access (see link below) and it draws attention to DigitalTransport4Africa.org, an initiative working "to scale up these mapping efforts and promote open data and sharing, open source tools and exchange and learning between African cities to build local data infrastructure, eco-systems and local capacities". Thanks to this initiative, one can easily find for example the GTFS data of cities such as Nairobi, Maputo, Accra and Cairo and others. Jackie and others are working to build a similar initiative in Latin America and I hope I will soon bring more info about this. Stay tuned.

Klopp, J. M., & Cavoli, C. (2019). Mapping minibuses in Maputo and Nairobi: engaging paratransit in transportation planning in African cities. Transport Reviews, 1-20.

Abstract:

Often called paratransit because of their flexible stops, schedules and routes, minibuses make up the bulk of public transport in African cities. Despite their ubiquity and importance, these systems are poorly understood by transportation planners who tend to focus on large-scale urban infrastructure projects such as highways, commuter rail or bus rapid transit systems. The assumption within much of this planning is that these minibus systems are barriers to change and will become at most secondary “feeder” buses within large-scale projects, but structured plans detailing this vision are lacking. This paper argues that frequent failure to collect data and value important paratransit systems as a critical part of transportation in their own right is deeply problematic from the point of view of equity, access and inclusive and effective planning. We ask whether the growing number of bottom up mapping projects of minibus systems can disrupt this status quo. By comparing two mapping projects, Digital Matatus in Nairobi and the Mapa Dos Chapas in Maputo, we find that inclusive, collaborative mapping can help render these minibuses more visible in planning and provoke more grounded and inclusive “planning conversations” on multi-modal integration, passenger information and minibus upgrading, all key but relatively marginalised aspects of creating accessible, low emission, high quality and safe public transport in African cities.

GTFS rotuer in R

For those interested in public transport research and planning, there is a new R package to do public transport routing using GTFS data. The gtfs-router package uses the power of C++ and it is quite efficient. This is only the release version of the package (0.01), though. There is a lot of room for improvements but I hope gtfs-router becomes a strong competitor to OpenTripPlanner in a couple of years.

The package was created by Mark Padgham (twitter), who is the author of/contributor to various other transport-related packages such as dodgr, bikedata and osmdata. Kudos to Mark!

ps. The capabilities of R for transport research and planning are greater than never. There is a very vibrant and active community with dozens of other packages. Perhaps this should be the topic for a future post.

image credit: Rstudio and smtd

Converting GTFS data into an igraph for network analysis in R

It is becoming ever more common for local transport authorities to publish their data on public transport networks in GTFS format. Two of the advantages of so many agencies using a standardized data format is that it makes it easier for us (1) to apply the same research methods to different cities and do comparative studies, and (2) to share our scripts, get feedback and learn from others. 

While working on my PhD on transportation equity in Rio de Janeiro, I have written a script in R that converts GTFS data into an igraph so I can run some network analysis. I shared this script on GitHub yesterday and it got the attention of a few people on Twitter, so I thought some of you might be interested as well. Get in touch if you would like to share any feedback or do some collaboration. :)

Mapping the Transit System of Rio with GTFS data

Here is my first experience mapping a transit system using GTFS data!

The map shows the bus public transport system of the city of Rio de Janeiro as of November 2014. The blue lines represent the bus routes, where color intensity and width vary according to service frequency per day. I have also included the city's street grid in the background (gray) to give a visual idea of the transport system coverage.

click on the image to enlarge it

The map was created in R (ggplot) using data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and GTFS data provided by Fetranspor/Va de onibus (this is basically the same transit data people have access to in their mobile apps). This great map by James Cheshire was the main inspiration, although I couldn't get to such a nice result as James did.

I've created this map a couple of months ago but still need to organize the R code before sharing it here with you. I am also working on an interactive version of this map, but this may take a little longer  I've been facing some deadline issues lately  Stay tuned.

Related Links

• Taxi vs Public Transit in major US cities
• Modeling Transport accessibility with open data 
• Real-time map of 202 transit systems worldwide

Taxi vs Public Transit in major US cities

Nate Silver has recently published a nice piece in his blog comparing the travel time performance of taxis (usin data from Waze) vs public transit (using GTFS data behind Google Maps). Nate compared average journeys from the Airport to downtown during weekdays in major US cities. Here is the result:

[image credit: Allison Mccann 538]

Real-time map of 202 transit systems worldwide

The team at geOps have used GTFS feeds to create an incredible real-time map of 202 transit systems around the world (mostly USA and Europe but there are a few cities in Mexico, Australia and Israel). If you zoom in enough you can see the vehicles moving, click on stops and vehicles to get information etc  (via @BrendnCasey).

You can check the map here and read some more information here, in German.

[image credit: geOps nor the University of Freiburg]

Related Links:

• Modeling Transport accessibility with open data
• Accessibility Observatory

Modeling Transport accessibility with GTFS, OpenStreetMap and OpenTripPlanner Analyst

David Levinson points out to this great presentation by Kevin Webb talking about Modeling Transport accessibility with open data. Kevin and his team at Conveyal combine GTFS data, OpenStreetMap and OpenTripPlanner Analyst to make simple and yet sophisticated analysis of transport accessibility.

I feel very enthusiastic about Kevin's presentation because part of my PhD thesis will be closely connected to some of the questions he raised. In one of my papers, I will analyze the distributional aspects of how the addition of new transport infrastructure/services in Rio de Janeiro (particularity related to mega events) will impact urban accessibility across the metropolitan area. I'll post some updates about my PhD research in the near future as I suffer to make some progress on it.

There are dozens of other thoughts, papers and Links on GTFS and transport accessibility I would like to share here (including the research conducted by Andrew Owen, D. Levinson and other researchers), but I'm sure we will have many more posts to do this in the near future.

Related Links:

• Interactive map about Accessibility to Jobs in NY from the Regional Planning Association 
• Apps that help you get around using GTFS data 
• Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the New York City transit system 
• A set of Python 3.4 tools for processing General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data
• How to convert GTFS to GIS shapefiles and KML
• The World Bank, Columbia University and MIT co-organized a workshop on GTFS Data in 2013. The follow-up materials (including notes, slides, codes and videos) can be accessed through this link.

[image credit: Andrew Byrd and OpenTripPlanner Team]

Accessibility Observatory + GTFS data

David Levinson, Andrew Owen and their team at the University of Minnesota have recently created the Accessibility Observatory. If you're interested in the topic, you may read a nice piece written by Emily Badger for TAC.

One of the greatest aspects of this project is about the data sources and methods they use for accessibility evaluation. Instead of relying on traditional household travel surveys, they combine open source data from OpenStreetMap (OSM) and from General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), developed by Google. With this sort of data it is possible to analyze jointly the public transport system as a whole (routes, stops, and schedules) plus pedestrian routes and walking times. There is a more detailed explanation of how it works here. 

I've bee thinking a lot about this 'empirical strategy' since I'm planning to dedicate part of my PhD to research socio-spatial inequalities in the distribution of accessibility. The more I think about this, the more I become a passionate skeptic, more passionate than skeptic.

To be honest, I believe that these data/methods are probably not going to revolutionize accessibility research in transport studies. However, this new 'empirical strategy' allows us to expand accessibility analysis so as to incorporate hundreds of cities where no travel survey has been undertaken. It also provides a tool with great potential to compare accessibility levels across space and time and to assess how certain modifications in the public transport system can affect accessibility levels. Not to mention the research questions you could address by combining these data/methods with Census data.

By the way, the use of GTFS in accessibility analysis is quite new. I have found a few applications that have been using GTFS since 2010 but none seems to be as advanced the Accessibility Observatory at Minnesota. Here is a list with some of those other initiatives:

• Stefan Wehrmeyer started in 2010 a project called mapnificent. Today it has perhaps the most comprehensive collection of cities so far.
  
  
• Comercial initiatives by Trulia in the US and by Mapumental in the UK.
  
  
• In 2011, Brookings Institution published the report 'Missed Opportunity - Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America' analysing job accessibility based on GTFS for 100 metropolitan areas in the US.
  
  
• Renato Vieira and Haddad (2012) proposed a similar approach to build an accessibility index to São Paulo.

In 2013 we saw many more initiatives:

• Yuval Hadas published a paper in the JTG: Assessing public transport systems connectivity based on Google Transit data
  
• WNYC came up with this map of Transit times in NYC
  
• Andrew Hardin has also created his version of the map covering four other cities. Here is a recent study where he explains how he calculates city wide travel times by simulating walking and public transit
  
• and finally, Sean Barbeau and Aaron Antrim wrote a nice piece on the many uses of GTFS data (slides)

I must be missing some other initiatives and publications, so please leave a comment to this post with suggestions and links if you remember any.

[image credit: Transit Accessibility for the Minneapolis St. Paul region from the Accessibility Observatory]