Hi all,
I have been working on building an analytical model to answer a variety of questions related to transit access in my region. We have 4 transit systems (3 in a metro and 1 in a micropolitan area) and all operate on a 'flag-down' basis -- in other words, while there is signage for stops and shelters, riders can hop on and hop off generally anywhere along a route where it is safe for a bus to stop.
Two of the metro agencies and the micropolitan agency have implemented this in GTFS by adding 'stops' at roughly every block or every other block, and this works relatively well for most applications. However, the remaining service had only plotted less than 50 stops across their entire system (their actual shelters), which was mapping things really poorly. In response to our concerns, they had planned on adding more stops to make their system model more like their neighbors, but after months of waiting they informed me that they just turned on a 'continuous' flag, which I'm seeing in the .txt files, but it does not appear to be read by my public transit network dataset in ArcGIS Pro. I am wondering if anyone has experience modeling continuous systems (especially those that connect with other systems w/ stops mapped), and how I might get the model to accept the lines as 'stops' while retaining the ability to model things like OD matrices and service areas. Thanks in advance.
