Regional Rail Schedule Generator

Generate a new GTFS schedule bundle for a proposed new MBTA service

How to update GTFS Bundles

To update the GTFS bundles, you need to pull down a bundle for a specific date, and then re-run the scenario generation.

make build date=YYYY-MM-DD

This will update all files under data/ for GTFS both present and for each scenario

How to add new stop

In order to add a completely new stop, you'll need to define an Infill Station.

In each scenario, there should be an infill_stations.py file. This file will be where you define new stops that don't currently exist in the network.

Using InfillStation (Recommended)

The easiest way to create new infill stations is using the InfillStation class, which automatically generates consistent IDs based on the route type:

from synthesize.definitions import InfillStation

# Regional Rail station (default route type)
station_revere_center = InfillStation(
    name="Revere Center",
    id="",  # Auto-generated: place-rr-revere-center
    location=(42.4154533, -70.9922548),
    municipality="Revere",
    route_type="regional_rail"  # Optional, this is the default
)

# Green Line Extension station
station_needham_heights = InfillStation(
    name="Needham Heights",
    id="",  # Auto-generated: place-glx-union-square-west
    location=(42.2936, -71.2364),
    municipality="Needham",
    route_type="green_line_extension"
)

# Blue Line Extension station
station_lynn_central = InfillStation(
    name="Lynn Central",
    id="",  # Auto-generated: place-blx-lynn-central
    location=(42.4629, -70.9457),
    municipality="Lynn",
    route_type="blue_line_extension"
)

# Red Line Extension station
station_arlington = InfillStation(
    name="Arlington Heights",
    id="",  # Auto-generated: place-rlx-arlington-heights
    location=(42.4259, -71.1763),
    municipality="Arlington",
    route_type="red_line_extension"
)

Supported route types:

• regional_rail: Regional Rail (generates place-rr- prefix) - default
• green_line_extension: Green Line Extension (generates place-glx- prefix)
• blue_line_extension: Blue Line extensions (generates place-blx- prefix)
• orange_line_extension: Orange Line extensions (generates place-olx- prefix)
• red_line_extension: Red Line extensions (generates place-rlx- prefix)
• silver_line_extension: Silver Line extensions (generates place-slx- prefix)

Using Station (Legacy)

You can still manually create stations if you need custom IDs:

from synthesize.definitions import Station

station_revere_center = Station(
    name="Revere Center",
    id="place-rr-revere-center",  # Manually specified
    location=(42.4154533, -70.9922548),
    municipality="Revere",
)

If you simply want to add a stop that already exists to a new route, you don't need to define a new infill station. You simply need to just add the stop to your scenario's schedule.

How to add new Route

To add a new route, you'll need a few definitions.

First a timetable, this defines how long it takes to get from stop to stop on the line

timetable = Timetable(
    {
        "Lynn": "0:00",
        "River Works": "0:02",
        ...
    }
)

Then a list of all stations in the line

stations = (
    "Lynn",
    "River Works",
    ...
)

Then define a new Route. Here's an example with the Blue line.

blue = Route(
    id="Blue",
    shadows_real_route="Blue",
    name="Blue Line",
    route_patterns=[
        RoutePattern(
            id="blue",
            name="Blue",
            stations=stations,
            timetable=timetable,
            schedule=all_day_5,
        )
    ],
)

If you are making a Route that doesn't currently exist in the system, you can exclude the shadows_real_route and it'll default to None.

Then in the scenario you are adding the line to, import your new route and add it in the subgraphs where it belongs

subgraphs = [
    [red],
    [blue],
    ...
]

How to add a new Scenario

A new scenario needs only a few elements. You can copy a lot of how the regional_rail scenario is defined.

You need a list of lines, infill stations (if your scenario needs any), and a file to write scenarios out to GTFS from the subgraphs.

scenario = evaluate_scenario(subgraphs)
write_scenario_gtfs(scenario, "gtfs-regional-rail")
archive_scenario_gtfs("gtfs-present")
archive_scenario_gtfs("gtfs-regional-rail")

Dev Setup

Dev setup is fairly simple.

• Python 3.12 with recent poetry (2.0.0 or later)
  • Verify with python --version && poetry --version
  • poetry self update to update poetry
  • Then run poetry install to download dependencies

After that all commands you need will be found in the Makefile