Planning Your Trip with Public Transportation
In much of the world, public transportation plays a major role in the daily lives of people. Buses, trains and subways, ferries, shared taxis and more.
It is very easy these days to plan travel based on public transportation, thanks to Google's GTFS (General Transit Feed Specifications). It's an incredibly useful tool providing public transit agencies with the ability to upload their stops and routes information to Google Maps, where it will be used by travelers to plan travel on the transit agency's network and even combine between agencies (such as riding the bus to one point and then hopping on a train). GTFS used to have only static information but today, real time capabilities have been added, so that you can plan not just in advance, but also know in real time where the bus or train is located along the route, and how long how long of a wait it's going to be.
Over time, GTFS has become much more than a standard for data feeds to Google Maps. Many popular travel websites, such as Kayak and Omio and Rome2Rio use GTFS to offer travelers the ability to make intermodal connections from point to point (as a matter of fact, even Relavanti itself is loosely based on a project called GoScopia, which started in 2009 and offered similar capabilities of intermodal passenger route planning).
Today, Relavanti has started using GTFS as part of the holistic relevance approach to travel planning. The idea is to offer the traveler the ability to see which stops and stations are around a particular location and use the routes that go through those stops and stations to plan and book services. This may sound a bit confusing, so allow me to offer a couple of examples:
Example 1: If you plan to visit the Sears Tower in Chicago, you can search Relavanti and see the nearest public transportation nodes to the Sears Tower.
Once the list of stations and stops (nodes) is displayed, you can filter them to see which has a direct route to another location, such as O'Hare International Airport.
The results displayed will include the public transportation nodes around the Sears Tower that have direct routes to O'Hare Airport (note: "direct" does not necessarily mean "nonstop", only that there is no need to transfer between buses or trains). You can see the nodes on the map and, around each of them, book services such as activities or hotels). In other words, by searching this way, you have asked Relavanti the question, "show me hotels closest to public transportation nodes around the Sears Tower, which have direct routes to O'Hare Airport".
Example 2: What if you have a trip that involves both the Sears Tower and Milwaukee (best small town in America, just two hours north!). You can run the same search for the Sears Tower and use the filter to show the nodes of transportation around the Sears Tower that have direct routes to Milwaukee.
Coming soon: We are also working to add a feature to connect the tours and activities in a certain area to public transportation. With this feature, you will be look for activities at a particular location, based on public transportation options. As an example: Show me activities that are on direct public transportation routes from a certain hotel in town.
In my opinion, this type of search capability is how people really want plan travel and it what Relavanti is designed to do - provide travel planning information and services designed to mimic how people search for travel.
Happy travels and thanks for reading!
Image: Public Transportation in Berlin, Germany. Credit: Yaoqi LAI, Wikimedia CC0