Representing traffic congestion in service alert

[paulineattal]

Introduce yourself

No response

Ask a question

Hello,
I am currently working on implementing GTFS-RT for our service alert and would like some clarification.

How should a disruption caused by traffic congestion be represented in GTFS-RT in cause and effect field (service alert feed) ?
==> is there a recommended way to distinguish congestion-related delays from other types of disruptions in the Alerts (e.g., using specific cause/effect values)?

Thank you in advance for your guidance.

[sebastianknopf]

For what I use together with my customers, we are using the cause of the traffic jam (for example an accident, police activity, wheather incidents) for mapping the cause and the effect (mainly delays and some few cancelled stops) for the effect as the traffic jam itself is just another effect, but not the real cause. In case of a high traffic volume we use OTHER_CAUSE actually.

Please not that if your agency is cancelling some stops (by a short-term turnover to the next trip), those cancelled stops should always be communicated using proper StopTimeUpdates as trip updates additionally to the service alert itself. For my opinion and experience, this is the optimal way instead of publishing several additional alerts for each shortened trip to ensure a proper passenger information.

[ckraatz]

The best fit for Traffic is Other_Cause. Traffic delays are probably common enough to justify a case for adding a Traffic Standard Cause, like the Special_Event Cause we're currently testing as a Producer (and looking for someone to test as a Consumer).

SimplifyTransit uses the cause_detail field in this way (a cause_detail = "traffic"), but because that's not a standardized enum it doesn't lend itself to data analysis.