Add cars_allowed field to trips.txt about transit HOT 8 OPEN

Support for this information will be implemented in OpenTripPlanner and Fintraffic will produce the data (at least for the ferries in Finland and maybe for trains as well). We have discussed this addition and potential ways it can be modeled in GTFS with some fellow OTP developers.

First alternative we came up with consists of:

1. Add cars_allowed field to trips.txt as suggested by @VillePihlava in #466 (comment).
2. Add cars_allowed to stops.txt as suggested by @VillePihlava in #466 (comment). There are at least trains in Finland which only allow boarding/alighting the vehicle with a car on certain stops that the trains go through.
3. Add car_pickup_type and car_drop_off_type to stop_times.txt. This would be required if there are stops which only allow boarding/alighting vehicle with a car on some trips that allow cars, but not on all. This is somewhat similar to how headsigns can be modeled both in trips.txt and stop_times.txt. In most cases, using the trips.txt would be sufficient. I'm not aware of a real-life example where this would be necessary, but there probably is somewhere in the world.

In this alternative, it would be possible to first add support for only the 1. (and maybe 2.) and later on expand the spec to support for modeling the edge cases. However, if a consumer has only added support for 1., there might be potential issues if 2. and 3. are added later on.

Second alternative:

from transit.

@VillePihlava Thanks for bringing this up here! This is pretty relatable. When travelling in the Greek islands, some ferries allowed for cars and others didn't. Would have been great to have GTFS information on this.

Also, thank you for posting your first issue on google/transit! Your contributions are always appreciated! 🚀

from transit.

The same improvement should also be applied to bike and wheelchair as well

from transit.

Another thing that has to be considered related to this is whether a stop has the accommodations for loading cars. The stops.txt GTFS file (https://gtfs.org/schedule/reference/#stopstxt) contains the wheelchair_boarding field. A similar field, such as car_boarding, should be added indicating whether a stop can get cars aboard ferries.

from transit.

Should we also consider the need to book in advance vs ad hoc boarding with cars? This could be tackled with more enum values. However, this same problem is currently unsolved for bikes and wheelchairs.

from transit.

Shall we then deprecate the current bikes_allowed and wheelchair_allowed field? Because bike support can be any of the following:

• (Cars / bikes / motorcycles / wheelchairs) can be carried on (the whole of / part of / no section) of the service
• (Cars / bikes / motorcycles / wheelchairs) can be carried (walk-on / reservation)
• (Cars / bikes / motorcycles / wheelchairs) (can / cannot) (board / alight) at a station for a service which can carry then, where (no action / booking / notifying the driver) is needed to do so.

I think a new table is needed to properly encode all of the above.

I hope I can add support to my journey planner for taking bikes onto the tube / train but it is impossible to encode the rules in the current GTFS spec.

from transit.

I think the proposal of adding a new file/table mentioned by @optionsome and @miklcct would be a good idea. Designing the proposal for the new file requires some work though. I can look more into this in ~1 month if this issue hasn't progressed in other directions by then.

from transit.

I'm not aware of GTFS having two ways of specifying the same thing or using a deprecation strategy so I think you will have to convince the community that it's worth doing it.

from transit.