Center for Urban Transportation Research

1. Center for Urban Transportation Research Using Open Data to Develop Multimodal Trip Planners for Livable Communities Edward L. Hillsman, Sean J. Barbeau Background Routing Bus Stop Inventories • Trip planning is important for transit, cycling, and walking, since pedestrian networks are dense and complex. • However: • data describing pedestrian networks are less complete than major road networks • more features are important (bike parking, intersection characteristics, crosswalks, curb cuts, slope, presence of shade) • data are expensive to collect and maintain by conventional means. • Can openly shared data from organizations (e.g., Departments of Transportation) and the community (e.g., OpenStreetMap.org) be used for multimodal trip planning? • OpenTripPlanner.org (OTP), an open-source multimodal trip planning solution, leverages OpenStreetMap and GTFS data. • OTP is developing rapidly and is being used in production trip planning systems • Attributes of intersections are important to comfort, safety, risk, and accessibility. Representing intersections as nodes may not capture features important to travelers • Can we easily import existing datasets into OpenStreetMap to quickly fill out community data? • There is a lack of standards for what to display for bike or walk routes, and how to display it • Need to accommodate different navigation styles (visual vs. procedural) • Problem: Bus stop inventories are often outdated, inaccurate, and costly to maintain • Solution: Synchronize bus stops from a transit agency’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) dataset with OpenStreetMap (OSM) • GO-Sync software tool enables agency to upload bus stop data to OSM, and retrieve “crowd-sourced” edits from the public(e.g., location corrections, new attributes of benches or shade) • GO-Sync also synchronizes new agency GTFS data when bus stops & service changes Challenges: Levels-of-service (LOS) • Bicycle and pedestrian LOS measures use speed and volume of car traffic. • Open Issue: These data are hard to crowd-source. Can other LOS measures be derived using objective values that are easier to measure? GO-Sync – An Open-Source Project to Sync General Transit Feed Spec. Data with OpenStreetMap Research funded by the National Center for Transit Research and the Florida Department of Transportation http://code.google.com/p/gtfs-osm-sync/