What would be the recommended way to represent such a custom presentation order for routes in GTFS?

[paulineattal]

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We are working on a passenger-facing application where routes need to be grouped and displayed according to their transport mode and submode. We would like to define a specific presentation priority for these categories, independently of the individual route ordering.

In our use case, we want to group and display routes according to their transport route_type, with a specific business-defined priority.

For example, we would like routes with route_type=200 be displayed first, followed by route_type = 712, etc...

Does GTFS provide a standard mechanism to define such a presentation order ?

We are aware of routes.route_sort_order, but this appears to define the order of individual routes rather than the priority of route categories. Would route_sort_order be the appropriate mechanism for this use case, or is there another recommended approach?

Thanks,
Pauline

[skinkie]

The grouping that you decribe seems to be application specific, isn't it?

[paulineattal]

To give you a bit more context about our use case:

We have a passenger information system provider that is responsible for displaying our route information. We asked them to group and display the routes according to their route_type, with a business-defined priority between the different types (for example, route_type=200 first, then route_type=712, etc.).

Their response was that they can implement this only if this information is provided in both the GTFS and NeTEx data.

This is why I am trying to understand whether there is a standard way to encode such a presentation priority in GTFS, and subsequently in NeTEx, since our NeTEx data is generated from our GTFS.

However, based on your comment, I am wondering whether this is actually an application-specific business rule rather than something that should be encoded in the GTFS/NeTEx data.

In other words, would it be more appropriate for us to ask the provider to configure a business rule such as:

route_type=200 → priority 1
route_type=712 → priority 2
...

rather than trying to encode this priority in the data itself?

And in that case, would route_sort_order only be intended to define the ordering of individual routes, rather than the priority/order of route_type categories?

I would appreciate your view on this, as we want to make sure we are putting this information at the right level: in the data model or in the application/business logic.

Thanks,
Pauline

[felixguendling]

If the router passes through route_type to the client via the API response, the sorting could be done in the frontend based on your specific business rules. I would neither modify the router for this, nor put business rules into GTFS.