Center for Urban Transportation Research | University of South Florida Development of a Regional Public Transportation GIS Architecture and Data Model with FDOT D7 Sean J. Barbeau, Ph.D. Funded by the National Center for Transit Research and the Florida Department of Transportation

2 Overview Challenges in regional transportation coordination Regional GIS Architecture and Data Model Demo Next Steps

3 Introduction Regional intermodal transportation coordination is important – Planning, construction, and operations of roads can affect transit, and vice versa Coordination can increase efficiency and cost- effectiveness for overlapping areas of service – E.g., Construction can be coordinated for roads and transit stops

4 Challenges Regional transportation coordination is difficult – Many jurisdictions with many points of contact – Constantly changing data – Data often stored in different formats – Various levels of technical expertise at different agencies – Time consuming to manually exchange/format/analyze data

5 Regional GIS Architecture and Data Model Project Concept: – Create a common data format for all transit agencies in a region (i.e., data model) – Create software to automatically retrieve transit data from regional agencies and import into FDOT District 7 geodatabase (i.e., GIS architecture) Benefits: – Reduce data exchange/formatting efforts – Common web-based view of intermodal data for all agencies

6 Transit Data Update Strategy Leverage existing General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data and process – GTFS used for Google Transit, other apps GTFS data consists of multiple text files GTFS data powers Google Transit and other apps

7 Known Florida agencies with GTFS data HART – Tampa PSTA – Clearwater/St. Pete SCAT - Sarasota LeeTran – Lee County SCAT – Space Coast BCT – Broward MDT – Miami-Dade Lynx – Orlando RTS – Gainesville Citrus Connection – Lakeland TriRail – Pompano Beach Estimated cost for putting data in GTFS format using consultant is $ per route

8 Adding new fields to GTFS data The project working group identified additional data that would be useful beyond existing GTFS data fields – Bus stop amenities – Further route classifications (e.g., local vs. express) – Performance stats (e.g., boardings, alightings per stop) Agencies add new fields to the GTFS route.txt and stops.txt files. e.g., for stops.txt: stop_idbike_racksignpark_and_ ride sheltertrash_canrestroomboardingsalightings

9 Regional GIS Architecture

10 Process per Agency Schedule Update 1.Transit agency (estimated 30 min to 3 hrs of work) : a)Adds extra fields to their GTFS data, and b)Uploads the google_transit.zip file to the agency’s website 2.FDOT D7 runs the GTFS Data Sync software:

11 Regional Visualization Website

12 Regional Visualization Website Additional details are available when zooming in FDOT Work Program Data HART Data

13 Regional Visualization Website Clicking on a bus stop gives additional info in popup

14 Regional Visualization Website Clicking on a route gives additional info in popup

15 Regional Visualization Website Clicking on a FDOT D7 work program gives info from D7 database

16 Regional Visualization Website Can query data via toolbar – e.g., shows all stops with shelters

17 Challenges Varying skills levels of data analysts at agencies 1.Highly skilled 2.Data analysis is secondary duty 3.Data analysis is outsourced In our pilot project, HART and PSTA were able to provide full datasets (GTFS + extras) – PCPT didn’t yet have a bus stop inventory or GTFS dataset Determining when to collect data is a challenge Potential lack of shape info in GTFS feed – Not required per GTFS spec – Without shape info of bus path, “connect-the-dots” of bus stops is shown as route shape

18 Next Steps Production deployment of tools at FDOT D7 – Integration of tools into FDOT D7 workflow FDOT D7 will coordinate with regional transit agencies so the agency uploads their new data with every schedule change FDOT D7 investigating sharing website publicly so agencies can also view the data Source code for project is open-source, so any agency or vendor can use/update it: – USF/RegionalTransitArchitecture/wiki USF/RegionalTransitArchitecture/wiki

19 Questions? Sean J. Barbeau, Ph.D Research Associate Center for Urban Transportation Research University of South Florida