Platform numbers for SNCB/NMBS

[pietervdvn]

We are starting to talk about using Itinero-transit commercially, but not having platform numbers is a bit of a deal breaker for that.

I know this is a bit of an issue, so I wanted to log this here and (re)start the effort to get the data.

[julianrojas87]

It is an issue indeed. The main problem is the way NMBS publishes that data in the GTFS dump.

In the stops.txt file they do provide identifiers for individual platforms. They link them to the main station identifiers via the parent_station parameter. However, they do not use the platform ids in the stop_times.txt definitions. Instead, they provide a non-standard GTFS file called stop_times_overrides.txt which overwrites the stop ids of each trip with the platforms ids.

We could somehow parse this file while creating the Linked Connections but this will break the compatibility of the static Linked Connections with the live data provided via their GTFS-RT feed, as they do not include any platform information there. And even if we could align the static and live data feeds, this would become an ad-hoc solution for NMBS, which is not ideal.

[pietervdvn]

For completeness:

In the stops-dataset, stations are given multiple times - once as they should be, once with a _1 suffix, where 1 is the platform number.

Also: some are duplicated with '00S' in the identifier.

[xivk]

We understand the reluctance to have something NMBS-specific. Is there something we could build that can augment the GTFS-RT data before it is consumed and turned into LCs? This would stay compatible with any future enhancements in GTFS-RT by NMBS...

The platforms really are a deal breaker, anything that can enable us to have them, even scraping them somewhere, is acceptable to us.