Re:Fixing Google Map Transit Feed Mistakes in Taiwan
by lqet on Thursday January 23, 2020 @06:50PM
(#22133691)
Indeed, but you are already one step ahead with real-time updates. This is an entirely different beast than static schedule data. In my experience (I occasionally talk to people in the industry), even providers of public transportation in cities with over 500,000 inhabitants have trouble providing reliable and machine-readable real-time information (like: this trip is cancelled today, this trip is 5 minutes delayed at station X, there is an additional trip Y today, expect delays this afternoon because of Z, ...). At least where I come from, the solution was that the state government decided to build a centralized infrastructure for all providers to use. Real-time information is displayed there on a website which also provides a real-time route planning. The real-time data is also available in machine-readable form.
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.
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.