stops.zone_id conditional requirement with presence of route-based fare_rules? about transit HOT 3 CLOSED

Yes I'd be happy to create a PR for this clarification. Thanks for the wording assistance–I'll pull something together with these in mind.

from transit.

I just wanted to call out some additional complexity with the spec here. Fares v1 was always underspecified in the spec so I'm not surprised there are holes here. I wanted to call out another.

Namely, I don't think there is anything in the spec that requires a feed to exhaustively define fares for all service in the feed. I think that's true for a single-agency feed, but I think it's especially true for multi-agency feeds where a single agency might have Fares v1 information, but another agency in the feed does not, for whatever reason.

Under these circumstances, there very well might be stops that do not have zone_id specified and also aren't used by a route that matches a fare rule. For these reasons, we (Google) don't actually enable the StopZoneIdValidator when validating feeds.

Ignoring validation for a moment and focusing only on the spec, I'd argue that the field is not actually required under any circumstances. I can think of many should statements that might trigger warnings, but fewer musts.

from transit.

Thanks for flagging this @westontrillium! There are two things that might need to be addressed here: primarily a spec clarification (as you pointed out) and secondly an adjustment to the validator rules to avoid this notice when zone-based fares are not being used.

On our end we tried to put together two spec clarification alternatives for stops.zone_id, but we didn't ended up having a significant improvement from your proposal, perhaps they can serve as inspiration to make some adjustments (if any) to your proposal.

• "Required if providing fare information using fare_rules.txt, except when the stop is only assigned to a trip_id in stop_times.txt whose route_id is present in a fare_rules.txt record and provides fare information only for fare_id and route_id.

• "Required if providing fare information using fare_rules.txt, except if only fare_rules.fare_id and fare_rules.route_id are provided for the corresponding trip_id that is assigned to the stop in stoptimes.txt”

Regarding the second step, we’re already included this in our backlog of validator changes.

Would you be interested in carrying this over to a PR?

from transit.