Types of Coverage

The Intermodal Routing API v8 offers three different levels of coverage with regards to public transit and external mobility services:

• Public Transit
  • real-time
  • timetable
  • estimated
• External Mobility Services
  • Parking Lots
  • Shared Vehicles

Public Transit

Real-Time

Real-time information enables the consideration of current vehicle locations or sudden service disruptions to provide the most up-to-date expected arrival time of transit services at a specific station. In the context of routing, real-time information is considered within the route and journey calculation process.

Timetable

The Intermodal Routing API v8 sources detailed transit schedules from transit agencies. These schedules may come in the form of actual times (for example, a train leaves a station at 09:18) or scheduled frequencies (for example, the bus runs every 20 minutes between the hours of 08:00 and 10:40 AM). In addition, timetable transit coverage areas are a more complete representation of the public transit networks available in a given city or metropolitan area.

Estimated

With this level of support, the Intermodal Routing API v8 provides our best forecast of travel time based on the transit network configuration, stop density, vehicle type, and the hours of operation of a given transit system when actual, granular transit schedule information is not available. It should also be noted that there are cases where these coverage areas are only partially complete and may not include all of the public transit options that serve a city. For example, this may include cases where the Intermodal Routing API v8 supports one or more, but not all, bus routes.

External mobility services

Parking lots

The Intermodal Routing API v8 introduces information about parking lots in the computation of routes to enable the Park and Ride service. This is critical when the destination of a route falls in urban areas with traffic restrictions (environmental zones) which are only accessible by specific vehicles. Park and Ride returns necessary route information to reach a destination by means of public transport from a strategic parking lot chosen along the route. Parking lots are collected from different external sources and contains information such as geographic location, opening times, pricing, availability.

Shared Vehicles

Shared vehicles dynamically scattered within a service area are collected from different external sources and used to expand the mobility options of a route. They enable intermodal services like Bike Share and Ride. In the case of bike-shared vehicles, there are two families of shared vehicles in the intermodal offer, namely station-based and free-floating. Users must return station-based vehicles at dedicated places. Whereas free-floating vehicles are not bound to any location and can be returned anywhere in the city but always within a defined service area. Usually, these restrictions are defined by the service provider and vary across providers, vehicle type, and urban contexts.