As cities grow due to increasing population, the pressure on transportation systems increases as well, which results in more complex challenges. In the big cities transportation alternatives evolving along with the depending on geography. Istanbul is the one of luckiest cities in this respect. Roads and railways as well as the sea route offer an efficient way to travel. When we count the public transportation agencies in Istanbul, we may find the informations below;
- 16 waterway agencies
- 8 bus agencies
- 3 railway agencies
- 2 “minibüs” and “dolmuş” agencies
Last two agencies – minibüs and dolmuş – are extremely flexible: these forms of public transport have fixed routes but no fixed stops (except for beginning or end). It is a challenge to get a good representation of these modalities in GTFS format.
The statistics of transportation in Istanbul indicates that most of the people prefer cars and buses. Railways and waterways are a few steps back of wheeled transportations.
IMM_PT_Statistics
Alternatives of public transportation and a number of agencies can become difficult to manage. In the current situation, local authority approves routes, stops and trips of the public transportation. According to the Smart Cities concept and the work of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s within the CitySDK, IMM is about to make agencies produce GTFS datasets rather than papers.
However, in the previous activities of public transportation in Istanbul or Turkey, GTFS was not an alternative solution. Now we make out that requirement with the CitySDK.
In the project activities that we named Istanbul Public Transportation Information System, IMM will develop some interfaces for the PT agencies rather than waiting to produce their own GTFS. These interfaces allow agencies to data entry, and it combines all agencies data to a single database. Also IMM will develop GTFS import and export tools for the database schema.
Thus, at the end of the project we will have a single GTFS file for whole Istanbul that collaborates all PT agencies. Our aim is to import and share the GTFS file via our CitySDK Mobility which runs at http://devcitysdk.ibb.gov.tr to end users and developers. In addition if gives our internal colleagues the benefit of a unified overview of Public Transport in Istanbul.
With the CitySDK Linked Data API and it’s capabilities in the Mobility domain, our aim is creating a platform and sharing related data for making possible to develop applications that provide solutions for mobility in Istanbul. For this reason we are very excited about the second Hackathonist which will be held 8th – 11th of May in Istanbul.