helbling
commented
6 years ago "Basel Dreispitz" means the train station and "Basel, Dreispitz" means the Tram/Bus station. In the source data from opentransportdata.swiss there is also a 2 min walk in-between them.
I would love to see better names for such stations (even worse is "Zürich, Wollishofen" vs "Zürich Wollishofen"). However this is a topic for BAV and the cantons which do the actual naming of stations.
About displaying the walks: we strongly think that our users are not dumb and specifically request a certain route. No footpath of that route is hidden. However in the algorithm itself there is a special case for stations which belong together so that the choice of transportation method does not depend much on the chosen station. You can always ignore walks which you don't consider necessary. You can use the METABHF file to figure out which station are considered to belong together.
Some stations are represented by multiple names in the database, but not recognized as equivalent. This leads to wrong departure and/or arrival times (which consider walking as well), and unnecessary sections.
For example "Basel Dreispitz" to "Basel SBB" includes two such ghost walk sections, adding an additional 8 minutes to actual travel duration:
This issue is likely related to the underlying fahrplan.search.ch API, but I figured it makes sense to track it here as well. Is there a best-practice way to report issues there (except for pinging @helbling 😃)? The general-purpose contact form seems a bit out of scope for that.