GBFS: org.mobilitydata.gbfs:Timezone.value() returning null, resulting in exception thrown and data not loading

[fpurcell]

Observed behavior

OTP seemingly not parsing timezone info from this feed: https://gbfs.biketownpdx.com/gbfs/2.3/gbfs.json The result is that the data is not loaded into OTP, and this exception being thrown:

10:59:11.490 ERROR [updater-0] (PollingGraphUpdater.java:68) Error while running polling updater VehicleRentalUpdater{source: GbfsVehicleRentalDataSource{url: 'https://gbfs.biketownpdx.com/gbfs/2.3/gbfs.json'}} java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot invoke "org.mobilitydata.gbfs.v2_3.system_information.GBFSData$Timezone.value()" because the return value of "org.mobilitydata.gbfs.v2_3.system_information.GBFSData.getTimezone()" is null at org.opentripplanner.updater.vehicle_rental.datasources.GbfsSystemInformationMapper.mapSystemInformation(GbfsSystemInformationMapper.java:45). at org.opentripplanner.updater.vehicle_rental.datasources.GbfsVehicleRentalDataSource.getUpdates(GbfsVehicleRentalDataSource.java:69) at org.opentripplanner.updater.vehicle_rental.VehicleRentalUpdater.runPolling(VehicleRentalUpdater.java:133) at org.opentripplanner.updater.spi.PollingGraphUpdater.run(PollingGraphUpdater.java:52) at org.opentripplanner.updater.GraphUpdaterManager.lambda$startUpdaters$0(GraphUpdaterManager.java:100) at java.base/java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:572) at java.base/java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.runAndReset(FutureTask.java:358) at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.run(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:305) at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1144) at java.base/java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:642) at java.base/java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:1583)

Version of OTP used (exact commit hash or JAR name)

version: 2.6.0-SNAPSHOT, commit: c19cef594d0696e5424398fe87acd317ab6ddf93 (earlier versions too ... sometime in past 6 months, this broke I believe)

Data sets in use (links to GTFS and OSM PBF files)

https://maps.trimet.org/ct/

Router config and graph build config JSON

https://maps.trimet.org/ct/router-config.json https://maps.trimet.org/ct/build-config.json https://maps.trimet.org/ct/otp-config.json

[hbruch]

I'd consider this a data error and not an OTP bug.

The GBFS spec says:

Timezone - TZ timezone from the https://www.iana.org/time-zones. Timezone names never contain the space character but MAY contain an underscore. Refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_zones for a list of valid values. Example: Asia/Tokyo, America/Los_Angeles or Africa/Cairo.

Instead of US/Pacific, the system_information.timezone thus should be America/Los_Angeles.

Besides this error, the GBFS Validator raises a couple of other issues with this feed, which might impact it's usability.

[leonardehrenfried]

So all the links in https://gbfs.biketownpdx.com/gbfs/2.3/gbfs.json point to gbfs.lyft.com URLs, so I'm assuming https://gbfs.lyft.com/gbfs/2.3/pdx/gbfs.json is now the canonical URL.

If you enter that URL into the GBFS validator you will see that the time zone is indeed incorrect. It's given as US/Pacific which is a link to America/Los_Angeles. Unfortunately, not many libraries or languages (like Java) support these links and that's why they are not allowed by the GBFS standard.

[leonardehrenfried]

Ah, @hbruch beat me to it. Do you know someone at Lyft that could fix this, @fpurcell?

[fpurcell]

I do not know anyone at Lyft, Leonard. Going to blindly send some alerts to folks tho, and hope for a response (low expectation that this will be resolved any time soon).

[fpurcell]

Having seen the data quality of GBFS and GTFS feeds for many years, my opinion would that OTP code not be so rigid and have work-arounds for such errors. In the case of timezone, it's my opinion that OTP should default to the system timezone, rather than throw an exception based on a null value from the parser.

[leonardehrenfried]

Thing is, even if the timezone problem was solved, there are other errors in the feed, namely in station_status and free_bike_status.

I am looking up people on LinkedIn who work on Lyft GBFS will send a few messages.

[fpurcell]

BTW, colleague Mike M. is reaching out to folks from City of Portland, who contract with Lyft for the service. Will see how it goes. I'll close the ticket.