Arcadis IBI Group’s Transit Places module improves geocoding results for transit-specific destinations

The geocoder is one of the fundamental components of trip planners. The ability to?map addresses and place names to coordinates and vice versa using geocoding APIs improves the speed and accuracy of planning multimodal trips and sharing real-time, location-based information with transit users.?

However, geocoder results can sometimes be inaccurate. Place names can be outdated, coordinates can be vague or incorrect, and places that move can sometimes be geocoded to the wrong location. This is especially true for transit. Almost all of us transit riders have had the experience of putting in the name of the airport and the geocoder putting a point in the middle of a runway or parking lot as opposed to the airport transit station.

That is the motivation beyond our development of the Transit Places module...and we have implemented it first in OpenTripPlanner (OTP) deployments. The Transit Places module improves search performance when planning a trip, allowing users to find queries, such as transit centers or bus stops, that often arise in transit planning contexts but need to be handled better by many geocoders.?

The Transit Places module augments geocoder responses with GTFS stop data and custom points of interest. This allows users to search directly for transit-specific destinations using either GTFS stop name, stop id or code, or colloquial place name. Search results autocomplete and are filtered by place type, which provides an intuitive and seamless user experience. Future enhancements include support for stops that are shared between multiple agencies.

The Transit Places module's design lends itself to easily incorporating features and modules to customize deployments. The Transit Places module can easily add value to transit agency websites and trip planners by improving transit-specific geocoding performance.?

We are going to bring this functionality to all our transit clients. We have also made this module's source code (https://github.com/ibi-group/pelias-stitch) available under an open-source license.

Please feel free to get in touch ([email protected]) if you are interested in knowing more.