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Analyzing public transport in the city of Buenos Aires with MobilityDB

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Abstract

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a data format widely used to share data about public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS comes in two versions: GTFS Static describing the planned itineraries and GTFS Realtime describing the actual ones. MobilityDB is a novel and free open-source moving object database, developed as a PostgreSQL and PostGIS extension, that adds spatial and temporal data types along with a large number of functions, that facilitate the analysis of mobility data. Loading GTFS data into MobilityDB is a quite complex task that, nevertheless, must be done in an ad-hoc fashion. This work describes how MobilityDB is used to analyze public transport mobility in the city of Buenos Aires, using both, static and real-time GTFS data for the Buenos Aires public transportation system. Visualizations are also produced to enhance the analysis. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to analyze GTFS data with a moving object database.

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Notes

  1. https://www.google.com/maps.

  2. https://github.com/pabloito/MDB-Importer.

  3. https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference.

  4. https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime/reference.

  5. https://docs.mobilitydb.com/MobilityDB/master/mobilitydb-manual.pdf.

  6. This example is based on the post https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/analyzing-gps-trajectories-at-scale-with-postgres-mobilitydb-amp/ba-p/1859278.

  7. Figure borrowed, with kind permission of the authors, from http://docs.mobilitydb.com/pub/MobilityDB_PGVision2021.pdf.

  8. Notice that the distance is a quadratic function and MobilityDB approximated it with a linear function.

  9. https://data.buenosaires.gob.ar/dataset?groups=movilidad.

  10. https://openmobilitydata.org/l/401-buenos-aires-autonomous-city-of-buenos-aires-argentina.

  11. https://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/desarrollourbano/transporte/apitransporte/api-doc.

  12. https://github.com/bmwcarit/barefoot.

  13. https://github.com/grafana/grafana.

  14. http://qgis.org.

  15. https://www.openstreetmap.org.

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Acknowledgements

Alejandro Vaisman was partially supported by Project PICT 2017-1054, from the Argentinian Scientific Agency.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, Lavardén 315, C1437FBG, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Juan Godfrid, Pablo Radnic & Alejandro Vaisman

  2. Department of Computer and Decision Engineering (CoDE), Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Avenue F. D. Roosevelt 50, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Esteban Zimányi

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  1. Juan Godfrid
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  2. Pablo Radnic
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  4. Esteban Zimányi
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Correspondence to Alejandro Vaisman.

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Godfrid, J., Radnic, P., Vaisman, A. et al. Analyzing public transport in the city of Buenos Aires with MobilityDB. Public Transp 14, 287–321 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12469-022-00290-8

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