Development of Statewide Transit Stop Inventory Field Collection System and Deployment Guidelines

Transit stop inventories are needed for various transit planning, operational, and maintenance applications. The traditional methods of collecting data for transit stop inventories using clipboard, pencil, and paper are time-consuming, inaccurate, and difficult to update, which often discourage transit agencies from committing resources to such effort. The accessibility of transit agencies to an automated, affordable system that can facilitate the collection and update of transit stop inventories can help to improve transit service. The availability of such a system can also contribute directly to the standardization of transit stop inventories and allow the development of customized tools and applications that can be used by multiple transit agencies and avoid duplication of effort. This paper describes an effort to develop an inexpensive automated system and deployment guidelines for collecting and analyzing standard transit stop data for Florida’s transit agencies. Unlike most existing systems that make use of third-party software and run on expensive bundled Global Positioning System (GPS) handheld units, the system described in this paper requires no additional commercial software and it makes use of the capabilities of an inexpensive handheld computer. Also described are some sample applications of the transit stop inventory that were implemented on a desktop standalone Geographic Information System (GIS).