Fixing Google Map Transit Feed Mistakes in Taiwan
taipeiurbanism.com
taipeiurbanism.com
Creating a transit data feed typically requires local knowledge, technical knowledge of data feed formats, and access to make changes to the data feed.
Actual transit providers typically lack the technical knowledge, especially for making day-to-day service updates. Transit enthusiasts lack the access to make changes to the feed. Google and mapping companies lack the local knowledge.
End result: Probably half the worlds population's local bus/train isn't accurate/present on Google/Apple/OSM maps.
How can this be solved? Perhaps some kind of feed-wiki so the three interested parties can do human collaboration?
There's also the Tripshot model -- an enterprise product where drivers install an app on a cell phone to track ridership, and it also sends the gps coordinates along.
That said, the other arcane part of transit directions is that if you update or break your feed, you have to wait hours or days before the result shows up on Google. (Sigh, batch processing...)
They only scrape daily by default because some transit providers host their multi-gigabyte GTFS feeds for all bus arrivals for the next century on an ISDN line...
Anecdotally, at a local system I once used there was an issue where drivers were intentionally not turning on the locating tracking, or configuring it incorrectly, because of this.
This is actually getting better, as most of the transit providers already rely on software companies that provide their own route planning software for passengers and/or administrative software like tools to create the actual schedule with. These companies are slowly getting better in providing standardized feeds.
I am skeptical that something like a feed-wiki would work, both because of vandalism, and because schedules are usually incredibly complex. You may have noticed that your bus starting at 14:30 from station X was scheduled incorrectly, but does this service has this mistake every day? What about the 3 days a year where this bus has a slightly different schedule? If the bus travels every 5 minutes, and each trip has this mistake, you have to manually check hundreds of trips per day if they contain this mistake. Automation is difficult here, because trips that occur frequently are very often not grouped by any mechanism (although for example GTFS provides such mechanisms).
I think the better way is a legislative change which requires all transit companies to submit their schedule data to a central authority, which then publishes the merged schedule.
There is now (since the beginning of 2020) a new EU regulation [0] which basically pushes for an EU-wide multimodal route planner and schedule dataset (published in a special format, NeTEx). This makes it now possible to rely on the data of existing national schedule aggregators, which have been checking and merging timetables of all national transit providers for decades. For example, in Switzerland, the national railway company SBB does this (GTFS feed published here [1]), in Austria its also the national railway company ÖBB, and in Germany, its Deutsche Bahn (GTFS feed published here [2]).
[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2017/1926/oj
[2] https://gtfs.de
This doesn't seem to apply to mid size networks and smaller.
For example, when tree falls and blocks a road, in a midsize network there'll probably be one admin-person in the office who decides what to do about it. Usually they'll just print off a paper sign saying "All services to X won't go past Y today", then ask a driver of another service to put that sign at each stop. They'll log into the website and put a banner at the top saying the same, and they'll ring the local radio station to announce it.
At no point does that info ever go into a computer in a machine-parsable form. Even if it did, timetables are probably saved in a big MS Word document.
It is a lot easier to convince a small bus operator in a rural area to just enter cancellations / delays into a website than it is to convince him to buy and administer servers and software to built its own real-time service.
huge disclaimer: I work at google, and on transit at that
There are two approaches to aggregating data. You can either treat each agency as a unique snowflake, or you can convince all agencies to use the same format. The former approach means that all work you do is only for you, and you've built up an interesting base of intellectual property in an industry that doesn't matter. (There is no money in providing transit directions.) The latter means that anyone can show up and do neat things with transit data. (I have my own little webpage, jrock.us/mta.html that uses this data to provide me with exactly the interface I want. Do you think the MTA wanted to hire programmers to make this for people like me? Absolutely not. But they did make it for Google, and now I benefit.)
It doesn't have data for Taiwan, unfortunately. Are there any that do?
Aside: Audrey Tang is also on HN, though not active much lately: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=audreyt It sometimes strikes me as surreal that powerful people actually hang out on the same websites as people like you and me.
Most transit providers don't see timetables and routes as something to be distributed for free to everyone. They see it as a revenue opportunity - they will only make schedules available in their own app (which only routes on transit from their company), or sold for money.
For smaller transit providers, they still want to be paid to produce the transit feeds, since they typically have to hire a programmer or buy software to make the transit feeds, and will only take on that cost if someone will pay for it - after all, they're happy with a paper printed timetable at the bus station.
In some cases, there are also bureaucratic hurdles. In one case I would really like to name but can't, a (very big) transit provider didn't own the copyright on the names of their own stations - they only had a license to use the names within their own country. They made a transit data feed, but since the feed contained station names, they needed to sign a contract with anyone who used it assuring them the names of the stations would never leave the country. Obviously no app can ever guarantee the names of the stations would never leave the country, so the city had no transit mapping for ~a decade.
This is much the same as AMP, which any link aggregator can use and many link aggregators do use, and dissimilar to something like Apple News API, which requires direct integration with Apple.
My first visit after the new Taoyuan line was completed was in July 2017, and I'm pretty sure it was incorrect then, too. A local told me about the new line and said it was so much better, but when I tried to use GMaps to plot the trip, it showed as much longer than the older, more complicated options (and yes, I did end up taking a taxi).
On my more recent trips I've ignored GMaps and taken the Taoyuan line to/from the airport, and it's so much nicer. If you're going somewhere near Taipei Main Station, the total trip time is roughly the same as that of a taxi; even if you're not, the cost savings is nice.
I'm currently visiting San Francisco (SF) and experienced an opposite issue where GMaps reported cheaper and it ended up being more expensive. The BART train is a relatively fast, very cost effective way to get from SFO to downtown SF, Powell station in particular.
I was debating Uber at $30-$40, but looked at GMaps for public and it told me $2.50 to make that trip! Sure it takes 40 minutes with a bit more sketch, but I'm visiting, I'm willing and it's cheap.
Loaded up my Clipper card (BART's transit payment card) and went - ultra surprised when exited the turn style that my charge was $9.80.
The to/from the airport is significantly more expensive, which is understandable, but $9.80 vs $30 is much different than $2.50 vs $30.
Mildly frustrating, but in the end, not the end of the world.
Also, SamTrans bus takes twice as long but is $2.25.
(Source: I work at Google and located the relevant bug, but I don't work on maps.)
I mean yes trains good, just saying.
I've been there in October and the data was not updated yet. I took the bus (which was shown as being faster!) and got stuck in a traffic for 2h. I arrived at my hotel exhausted and frustrated.
Buses are less reliable, prone to traffic, less comfortable (especially if crowded)...
There are some other apps like Transit App that attempt to crowdsource the same data to reflect ETAs.
1) I don't want to feed the Google behemoth
2) It's very very accurate, even tells if you should get in the back/center/front to be closer to next commute/exit
3) They joke about strikes to brighten a bit those shitty days