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umts / BusInfoBoard

A place to view bus arrival information from Avail's JSON feed
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Opportunity trips shown far in advance #3

Closed dfaulken closed 9 years ago

dfaulken commented 10 years ago

I saw Bus Garage via Mass Ave for route 30 about three hours before it was supposed to happen on Saturday night. If we can find a way not to show opportunity trips at all, it'll take care of this, but otherwise it would definitely be great if we didn't show opportunity trips several hours in advance.

dfaulken commented 10 years ago

@werebus mentioned today that there's no generic way to go about doing this, for two reasons:

  1. While we might want to exclude any trips that have the word "Garage" in them, this might not be true for other transit agencies, and there's currently no way in the XML JSON we get from InfoPoint to categorically distinguish opportunity trips.
  2. It wouldn't make sense to throw out any trips that are a certain number of minutes in advance. This might make sense for things like Bus Garage via Mass Ave happening in three hours, but in the case of outreaches like the Belchertown Center bus, people might actually want to know that the next bus isn't for a few hours.
werebus commented 10 years ago

@sherson, was there any hope of removing non-public trips from the JSON feed? I know we had asked them about their own bus tracker, right?

sherson commented 10 years ago

I'll bring it up in tomorrow's conference call (assuming we have cell coverage from the car as we should be in southern VT at that point). Carl had mentioned something similar on Saturday (just after 3 pm) when the feed showed an out of service 33 bus expected at GRC in 3 hours (which has the additional problem of being OOS instead of headed to the garage... noted in umts/transit-it#211).

sherson commented 10 years ago

Last week's Avail conference call was cancelled, so I emailed the project manager about this (on 9/30, 10/1, and again this morning).

This week's conference call has been rescheduled for Thursday... if they haven't responded by then, I'll bring it up.

sherson commented 10 years ago

I brought it up again during today's call and they're looking into it.

sherson commented 10 years ago

I emailed Avail again about it this morning.

sherson commented 9 years ago

Avail said no. From this morning's email:

To exclude non-public trips requires a significant change to how we handle trips in our DB structure for data imports, and as such we cannot support this particular request at this time.

This is a bit frustrating since the public flag is in the Giro-Avail AVL interface specifications (in the TRP file).

@ImaFire and I already talked about it; we might switch back to a non-public route for Opportunity trips when we update Hastus next Summer (there are pros and cons... we have some time to think about it).

In the short term, the easiest option is to remove trips with "Garage" in them, as @werebus mentioned above. Feels like a kludge, but nothing better comes to mind.

dfaulken commented 9 years ago

I think a decent middle ground would be excluding trips specifically with the name "Bus Garage via Mass Ave" or "Bus Garage via Compsci" since we know that that will only exclude our opportunity trips.

bcspragu commented 9 years ago

I like Dave's point that it's two very specific names. However, I don't like hard coding anything specific to our organization in there if we're going to have this be open-source and show other organizations how to use it. I'll add a query string parameter of trips to ignore, and I'll document it, and I'll close this issue when it's done.

sherson commented 9 years ago

Awesome (I feel sheepish for considering hard coding it, even as a temporary measure).