Under a grant from the Federal Transit Administration’s Mobility for All Pilot Program (M4A), the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) took a “solid first step” toward filling a pressing need for standardized and computer-readable data that describes rider eligibility (characteristics that qualify a rider to use a specialized transportation service; service capability (ability to meet rider needs); and trip purpose eligibility (trip intent matches service requirements).
GTFS-eligibilities and GTFS-capabilities are new data standards in development. When complete, they will describe the many factors that can determine access to transit services, particularly specialized transportation services.
GTFS-eligibilities will deal with how a person’s individual characteristics (e.g., age, disability status, residence, employment, or registration in a program) may affect their access to public transportation services.
GTFS-capabilities will describe a transportation provider’s ability to meet a rider’s needs (e.g., whether the provider offers services such as door-to-door service, door-through-door service, stretcher service, mobility device accommodation, and bariatric capability).
Such information is currently available to the public in analog or one-off digital formats only. This absence creates a range of unnecessary difficulties:
• Discovering services is labor-intensive, often with the burden falling on riders themselves to figure out what exists, whether they qualify for a specific type of transportation, and whether a provider can meet their service needs;
• It’s difficult for transit agencies to communicate about their services, especially specialized services, to the public; and
• It adds barriers to planners, policymakers, and researchers understanding how eligibility factors and agencies’ ability to provide specialized services affect different populations’ mobility.
To ensure that this effort was worthwhile and didn’t duplicate existing work, ODOT requested that its consultant, Full Path Transit Technology (Full Path), conduct research into completed and in-process efforts to define and enumerate these three areas. There is a well-established transit data standard (the General Transit Feed Specification or GTFS) as well as several “extensions” to the GTFS that expand its utility to the complex world of transportation data. However, this research indicated that no existing efforts address the need for data standards relating to rider eligibility, service capability, and trip purpose eligibility.
To develop an initial proposal for two extensions to the GTFS, Full Path convened an advisory group. This group was made up of experts in the fields of human services transportation, disability advocacy, public transit, data standards development, and transit-related software development to provide input and guidance to this project overall. The panel’s work centered on ensuring that the standards being defined meet the needs of riders and the agencies that serve them, while also being technically sound.
A Technical Working Group, a subset of the advisory group, worked on the very detailed technical work of developing the proposed standards. Once complete, the draft extensions will be made available for continued refinement and ultimately adoption by implementers and ongoing oversight by the appropriate standards body.
The project’s budget and timeline required focusing on an achievable result. Accordingly, it was decided that the scope would be limited to the discovery stage of the trip lifecycle, despite early discussions of possibly including registration/booking stages. Another key decision was emphasizing the ease of creating a data feed over completeness and exactness of data. For example, the group determined that it was more important for this early version of GTFS-capabilities to provide service-level information about capabilities, rather than requiring service providers to supply detailed information about every vehicle in their fleet. The advisory group also chose to emphasize flexibility in describing eligibility categories rather than imposition of definitions. The resulting proposal for GTFS-eligibilities introduces Universal Resource Names (URNs) as a structured way of developing unique identifiers for eligibility categories.
Because this project was intended to offer a foundation in the development of GTFS-eligibilities and GTFS-capabilities, several next steps and opportunities were identified:
• Supporting cross-institutional conversations to develop agreement on common goals and processes;
• Inclusive engagement with riders during the development of applications that use the proposed standards;
• Inclusive governance for the standards that entities that are accountable to the public interest;
• Engaging people and agencies from throughout the world (to get beyond the United States focus of this project); sustained funding for data production and consumption; • Ongoing development and support around URNs as a concept that is new to the transit world;
• Developing ability to track real-time information about seating area configuration changes through GTFS-capabilities; and
• Support for multiple languages under all scenarios.
The effort is a continuation of ODOT’s ongoing work to support the accessibility and usefulness of transit services through open data and address equity goals laid out in the Oregon Public Transportation Plan.
On August 25, Kevin Chambers of Full Path Transit Technology presented a webinar this project, sharing project findings and discussing the challenges, how this work will continue, and how it can benefit transit agencies’ in providing specialized transportation services. The webinar recording is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsfMdNKkzOA