Public Transit Evaluator Returning Same Service Area Results

[HeatherShearer55]

Hi, I am working on a network analysis using the ArcGIS Pro tutorial template network. I left everything as is except for adding a walking mode (distance). However, no matter what day and time I input, the public transport analysis returns the same polygons (I checked connectivity, changed time to UTC and back again, etc). The walk calculation works very well, but not the public transport. Could the issue be with the GTFS files that I downloaded from the public transport authority and not the network? Any help much appreciated. 

[MelindaMorang · Accepted solution]

Hello Heather.

My best guess would be a problem with the weekday or day of week you're using for your analysis and its relationship with the valid days and dates for the original GTFS dataset.

In the tutorial, in the "Examine your input data" section, there's some discussion of the best way to examine your GTFS data's calendar.txt and calendar_dates.txt files to determine the valid days and dates. When you set the start time for your analysis, you need to pick something that works for your analysis.

Let me know if a review of that part of the tutorial doesn't help you find the problem, and we can take it from there.

[HeatherShearer55]

Thank you SO much. I will do that. Your tutorial was great and I will go through in greater detail. And thank you so much for replying, I find your tutorials and various toolboxes incredibly useful 🙂 

Will let you know how I go. 

[HeatherShearer55]

My GTFS files were a bit odd (some times were like 25:01:02) but there were no blank stop times. The weird thing was that it worked for specific weekdays (the files were for a specific date range) but not for out of hours or weekends (gave the same result as, for example, 8am on a Wednesday). I just need to keep looking for why the issue is happening. In the end, I just used your BetterBusBuffers toolbox to calculate what I needed (for a generic workday). Thanks again. 

[MelindaMorang]

I'm happy that you're happy, although I don't quite understand how you solved your problem. The BetterBusBuffers toolbox is intended to solve a different problem than the transit-enabled network datasets described in the Pro tutorial.

I think you need to take a look at the weekday fields and date ranges in calendar.txt and the specific dates available in calendar_dates.txt to determine a) whether or not you can use a generic weekday at all and b) what specific dates are valid for your data.

The blank stop times should not be a problem if you use the option to interpolate them when running GTFS To Network Dataset Transit Sources. In other words, I don't think that's causing the described problem.

[HeatherShearer55]

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I used BBB to calculate high frequency stops and then created service areas around these just using a generic weekday time. Will definitely look more into the stops file to see why the PT evaluator is not returning (markedly) different results for after hours etc.