I activated your real-time services at rideschedules.com and everything looks okay except for unfriendly calendar lists and response latency for trip updates.
CALENDAR.TXT
Please remember the calendar.txt entries is also the browsable list of timetables, which should correspond to your print and other publications.
When calendar entries overlap there is confusion about what you are looking at.
For example,
Instead of:
Weekay (Mar 30, 2017 - Jul 6, 2017)
Weekay (Mar 30, 2017 - Jul 7, 2017)
…
A user friendly alternative would be:
Weekay (Mar 30, 2017 - Jul 6, 2017)
Friday (Jul 7, 2017 - Jul 7, 2017)
A simple way of creating friendly calendar entries is to keep dates non-overlapping and continuous (and, of course, including all trips for each entry).
TRIP UPDATES RESPONSE LATENCY
On average a real-time request takes over 30 seconds to complete.
By that time, you and most others would have concluded it doesn’t work and moved on.
Sorry, I don’t know enough about your system to say how to improve this but from what I see if contract agency_ids where modified for each file to completely describe each agency (which in turn would produce valid datasets) then trip updates could be broken apart correspondingly and lead to reduced latency.
OTHER ISSUES
There is extraneous or incorrect data appearing in the trains GTFS. For example, trip direction “Empty Train” and route names “Out of Service”, and “Revenue”.
Payoff is the highest at the end when details like this can easily be fixed to create significant improvement in user experience. I hope you take the time to do that.
Feel free to visit rideschedules.com to see and polish your data and service.
Feedback about our service is always welcome!
