Are you enjoying running Fast-Trips on the small test network but ready for a “big time” network? Today is your lucky day.

The general approach to creating networks is to take the travel demand model networks that each agency already produces and add information to them to create a schedule-based network as required by our GTFS-PLUS network specification [ and discussed in this blog post ].

Network Conversion Scripts

The team has created two network conversion scripts: one that converts PSRC’s SoundCast’s EMME networks into GTFS-PLUS networks that Fast-Trips can read and the other that uses SFCTA’s “Network Wrangler” to convert SF-CHAMP networks to GTFS-PLUS. While the PSRC version requires an EMME license, SFCTA’s Network Wrangler is based in Python and can therefore be run by anyone.

SoundCast Fast-Trips Network Builder

The SoundCast Fast-Trips Network Builder converts SoundCast’s Emme networks into GTFS-PLUS networks by completing a bunch of data transformations and simulating a transit schedule either based on average headways for a given time period [ good for future year data ] or by grabbing the GTFS schedule [ good for base year data where the schedule is known ].

Network Wrangler

Network Wrangler is the codebase that SFCTA uses to build their transit and highway networks. It has class objects for things like transit lines, nodes and transit networks. When possible, these classes were just extended to be able to write out GTFS-PLUS files. However, quite a bit of logic had to be built in in order to incorporate things such as complex fare structures.

The script can be run as follows:

python convert_cube_to_fasttrips.py network_specification.py

There is still a bit of work to be sorted out to come up with the version of the network that we will be happy with, but we can still get some good mileage out of this version. In particular, there are additional data fields that would be nice to populate and the base year schedule should be synched with existing GTFS data rather than randomized across a log-normal schedule.

Network File

Want to take Fast-Trips for a spin right now? Feel free to download Take-1 of the San Francisco Bay Area Network and use it in combination with the first draft of the San Francisco Bay Area Demand