Bay Area Regional GTFS Feed: 31 transit agency feeds together in one API
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But on the other, why on earth does the bay area have 31+ different transit agencies??
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.
Makes sense to me, especially if you are paying local income taxes in that area. I seem to recall from high school that 'taxation without representation' caused a big kerfluffle a couple hundred years ago.
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.
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?
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.
* Should a lot be used to build a park or a parking lot? The park is advantageous to the school next door, so it is a civic issue. The parking lot is advantageous to the businesses nearby, so it is a business issue.
* Arterial infrastructure as purely business? Utter nonsense. Placing a highway means that all houses within a block are now significantly noisier, a civic issue. It decreases walkability, as there is now one direction that cannot be walked, unless you take a mile-long detour.
* Residential zoning a purely civic issue? Nonsense. How would you ensure that people are close enough to reach a grocery store? How could you have mixed-used development, where the ground floor are shops and the higher floors are residential?
The only way this idea makes sense is if a city has already decided to separate out business and civic areas, which requires a significant investment into car-only infrastructure.
Look at Boston. They canned I695 to stop a couple neighborhoods from being demolished and in doing so basically required all the major surface roads to handle significant commuter traffic (killing how many people over the years?) because they became the de-facto main arteries and horribly compromised future subway lines at the same time (in addition to a laundry list of other negative downstream effects).
Portland started ripping out freeways after I-205 destroyed multiple neighborhoods, and Seattlites organized to stop the central district freeway after watching I-5 vivisect the city, paving parks and neighborhoods.
Look at the wealth disparity between the Worcester area (tolerable commuting access by rail and car to Boston) and the Fitchburg area (far less tolerable commuting access by rail and car to Boston) and then say that. As regrettable as it may be the best way for people who do not live in Boston to move up the economic ladder is to commute into Boston where you can make the big bucks and for practicality reasons doing so in a car is the least worst choice available to most people. Literally no party involved likes this arrangement but forcing every commuter that has to go somewhere between I93 and I95 onto surface roads ASAP does nobody any good. I'd call it cutting off your nose to spite your face but spiting one's face implies a level of forethought that was clearly absent.
Any major city is going to have a huge number of car commuters no matter what and decreasing the distance between the highways and their destination makes all the infrastructural changes at the surface road level that make a city less car centric more palletable.
The thing that really pissed me off about I695 isn't the specific highway or lack thereof specifically but that is represents a turning point prior to which it was possible to step on a few toes in order to get something that benefited everyone done and after which everything had to be compromised to hell and back in order to not run afoul of even the most microscopic stakeholder. This has just as big of an impact for public transportation infrastructure as it does for private transportation infrastructure and one would have to be a very near sighted fool to cheer that.
At the end of the day it comes down to regional interests vs local interests. The way I see it is that if Boston had built good highways in the 50s and 60s they would have been building subways in the 90s and '00s instead of digging overpriced tunnels. By caving to special interests they screwed themselves onto on a path that led us to where we are today.
From a customer perspective, it seems to work well: one map, one timetable, one fare payment program, one branding, regardless of what city or suburb or wherever you’re in.
It does have the occasional political snag though of suburbs occasionally spreading core service in Dallas proper thinner than they should be (e.g. in order to get DART representatives from the suburbs to sign off on a second subway alignment through downtown, urban Dallas representatives had to agree to fund a suburban-only E-W line that could have been better located also in the city proper). But, each city does contribute an equal proportion of funding (1% of all sales tax revenue) to DART, so it seems fair enough.
The result? From having no rail network in 1996 to having the US’s longest* single light rail network by 2020
*by track mileage; that isn’t to say the breadth of the system doesn’t have its own flaws, mainly that some high density urban areas are woefully underserved in the effort to have a single station in every (very car-oriented) member suburb
I know Palo Alto Forward was trying to do this a while back - it'd be nice if we could block vote in people that could massively upzone housing (or make whatever change is necessary to increase housing supply).
Myself and a lot of my friends live in these towns with roommates - I'd think if there was a clear group to vote for and clear policy to push to increase housing we'd have a lot of votes.
It's hard to even find what the existing law around building housing is, is it online anywhere?
And yes, there is a lot of troll in that comment :P.
A regional feed would make things easier for developers, not so much commuters, who are already relying on aforementioned products.
For anyone interested in playing with GTFS feeds in their area, I recommend checking out TransitFeeds' list: https://transitfeeds.com/feeds
- 7,000m^2
- 7.75 million people
- 101 municipal governments
Shocking that we only have 31+ transit agencies. The place is dense!
We're talking a 30 year timeline, though.
A lot of it boils down into tiny municipalities being able to avoid a cripple larger metros that the littler metros hem in.
If that magic combination ever happened, it would be San Jose as the main city. And somehow I don't think San Francisco would be happy being a borough of San Jose.
https://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/01/05/how-google-and-portlan...
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
GTFS-Realtime Trip Updates provides real-time updates on the vehicle positions for an agency in the Protocol Buffer format.https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/General_Transit_Feed_Spe...
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]
For what it's worth, this would bring ODbL-licensed data into an output GTFS feed.