Questions: What does GCRTA you use to build your schedules?

Does that package have the routes build graphically in it?

Do you have a lot of branching or alternate routing on a trip by trip basis?

Is your GIS data for a route including all patterns or do you have each possible
pattern mapped separately?

First off, let me say this is coming from someone at a transit system
(Milwaukee, WI) not a Google Transit person.

Now, I do not know how technical you are when in comes to data feeds, so please
forgive me if I get to basic or too geeky.

The Google Transit Feed Spec is located at:
http://code.google.com/transit/spec/transit_feed_specification.html

Visit that site and it will describe what the files need. The shapes file is
basically a series of lat/lon values. But the key to this is the shape_id. That
shape ID is also part of the Trip data. There will be at least 2 trip patterns
for a route, one for the first direction and one for the return direction. Take
for example the Rotue 8. A trip that starts at A and travels westbound to C.
The shapes.txt will have a list of all lat/lon points along that trip, in the
order the vehicle travels the route. That collection of points is assigned a
shape_id, for instance 8_0_1, for route 8, direction 0, pattern 1. Any trip that
travels the exact same sequence from A to C will have the shape_id of 8_0_1
assigned to it in the GTFS data. Now the return trip from C to A would be the
sequence of lat/lon points going the other way and have a unique shape_id as
well, say 8_1_2 and those trips would need that shape_id included on the records
as well. Now if there is a branch or alternate route, the whole thing is
repeated again, for both directions. As you could guess, this could become
extremely time consuming if you do not already have the individual trip patterns
in your GIS system.

Questions: What does GCRTA you use to build your schedules? Does that package have the routes build graphically in it? Do you have a lot of branching or alternate routing on a trip by trip basis? Is your GIS data for a route including all patterns or do you have each possible
pattern mapped separately?

Dale

Hi.

I have been asked by our webmaster to create the shapes.txt file. Being completely new and inexperienced with Google Transit feed, I need help. I work with GIS files and have a map of all the routes. I have no idea how to create the shapes.txt file, how to get the data, or anything.

i would greatly appreiciate any guidance you might have for beginners like me.

Thanks