Open barbeau opened 8 years ago
I was thinking the same thing. Along with the gtfs-realtime alerts, we could also consider adjusting the returned routes (banning, or just lowering their priority) when a particular alert is active.
Two libraries for generating GTFS-rt Service Alerts (both from OBA - 2nd is newer):
I recall some debates for how/whether GTFS-rt Service Alerts are supposed to impact trip plans. The argument against allowing Service Alerts to cancel trips is that TripUpdates feeds support this functionality, so it's duplicative to have it in Service Alerts. The argument for allowing Service Alerts to cancel trips is that it allows an agency to use simpler tools to generate a Service Alert, so agencies without an AVL system can still communicate cancellations.
Here's Google best practices for alerts:
It says:
If the effect is NO_SERVICE, our system attempts to offer alternative routes to queries that find trips or routes currently without service.
After a bit more Googling, it looks like OTP used to support canceling trips via Service Alerts and NO_SERVICE
, but that functionality was removed after feedback from TriMet:
https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner/issues/1368
So I'd say for now let's just work on showing the alert as information, but not have it affect routing. We'll need to have a discussion with the OTP and GTFS-rt community for that.
It would be nice if we could add an alert feature so that parking and/or traffic alerts (or any other alert type) could be displayed on the map screen for maps.usf.edu.
For example, over the weekend this Tweet went out:
Full text from site:
I imagine we'd want a summary shown in the app, like "Parking and Traffic Alert for September 6th" - maybe something like:
...and when clicking on the summary, you'd be redirected to the main USF page with all the details.
I'll check with USF to see if they have an RSS feed or some other API that we could use to pull this info - I'm guessing they don't, as it isn't listed on the main USF page (http://www.usf.edu/).
If we are going to generate these ourselves, we could possibly leverage the GTFS-realtime ServiceAlert format for this, although it's currently aimed at transit features. We're need to figure out how to add parking/traffic issues.
A really nice feature would be to have polygons that showed the affected area of campus (maybe as a layer in our Layer mode?), as explained in the message above. That's probably a v2 of this feature, though - just getting an alert at the top would be a nice first step.