faq 311656454

PT: transfer walks vs. direct walks

by Davi Bicudo on 2018-08-22 08:03:03

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Hi,

The PT router assigns direct walks between activities whenever this costs less than the best PT route. These direct walks are conceptually the same as regular walks, but actually named "transit_walk" (maybe to indicate that it was generated by the PT router so that it is understandable why someone with mode="pt" is actually walking).

Walks in a PT transfer are also called "transit_walk". This makes it confusing and leads to issues with scoring later, since these are two different kinds of walk but with the same name and scoring parameters.

I know there is a directWalkFactor option that reduces these direct walks by making them more expensive than PT routes, but when the closest stop is the same stop for both origin and destination activities, then the direct walk is the only option.

Am I missing something? If not, is there a suggested way of dealing with this?

Thanks!

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Comments: 1

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Re: PT: transfer walks vs. direct walks

by Thibaut Dubernet on 2018-08-22 08:27:52

Unfortunately, this is necessary in the current state of our data structures: if the leg was marked as "walk", the next time the plan is routed, the leg would be routed as "walk" instead of PT, which we do not want.

There was also the discussion of forcing PT trips through at least one stop, but it was decided against it for various reasons (there should be an issue on JIRA if you are interested in the arguments).

What is actually the problem in your case? The different names do not come from the assumption that those are different modes, but from a very technical standpoint. They should have the same scoring parameters, and I am pretty sure the default scoring is done in a way that (given those identical parameters) score should not depend on the name.