TriMet Time Table Creation Process with TTPUB Frank Purcell Updated 2-15-2011 Original 2-15-2011

Print Production Hastus 1 Enterprise DB DIFF TOOL 2 Scheduling 3 Process Scheduling folks finalize the quarterly schedule. On-street Communication team uses TTPUB (diff tool) to determine what’s changed in the schedule. They use TTPUB to configure (e.g., add footnotes, select time-points, etc…) the raw schedule data, then export data files for the graphic design team. Graphic designer imports the data files into inDesign templates. Goal: zero manual touching of the data. Various Adobe inDesign documents are then sent to a print shop. The final timetables shipped/installed. NOTE -- 3 different document types are printed: poster sized platform schedules, single line folded schedules, and an annual schedule book. Hastus 1 Enterprise DB DIFF TOOL TTPUB 2 Scheduling 3 Configure TTPUB Export inDesign TTPUB Install 5 Print Templates Adobe inDesign Printer 4 On-street Comm Designer

Web Production Hastus 1 Enterprise DB Scheduling 3 Configure 4 Scheduling folks may make ‘tweaks’ to the quarterly schedule (e.g., detours, adjustments, etc…). Every Thursday morning, a CRON (automation) job will run TTPUB to generate a schedule and a report. http://trimet.org/schedule/ttReport.html The On-street Communication team reads the report, and will adjust the TTPUB configuration if necessary The CRON job will run again on Sunday morning, and post a fresh set of web timetables to trimet.org. NOTE: the TTPUB Config work done for printed output is used in generating the weekly web timetables. For the most part, web timetables require little additional effort (e.g., it’s only when a timepoint is part of a detour that work needs to be done to adjust the TTPUB config). At TriMet, two instances of TTPUB are running…one to prepare the new quarterly schedule for print, and the other for tweaks to the web configuration. Hastus 1 Enterprise DB Scheduling 3 Configure TTPUB 4 Thursday Report TTPUB Sunday Publish TTPUB 2 On-street Comm CRON

Two notes about TTPUB at TriMet First: because manipulating rows of stop times is prone to error, we have a goal at TriMet to never touch that data. Instead we use TTPUB to export data in a format that Adobe inDesign can read into a document template (an example inDesign template is available from http://timetablepublisher.org). That said, there is one ‘printed’ schedule (Weekday MAX Blue http://trimet.org/schedules/w/t1100_1.htm), which has Friday-only trips that are cut-and-pasted into a special section on the schedule document. Other than that, no one touches stop time data. Ever. All data is pulled from the scheduling database, and manipulated into something readable by TTPUB. A good guideline is that if human hands are editing/copying/pasting scheduling data, something is probably wrong. ---- Second: it’s important to note that at TriMet, we do not use TTPUB’s GTFS data loader. We instead connect TTPUB to our internal scheduling database. The GTFS data loader is great because it opens TTPUB up to many other agencies; but the data loader functionality is limited when compared to a database (e.g., no date-based ‘Compare’ with the GTFS loader). The TTPUB code available on http://timetablepublisher.org is the same code we use at TriMet (the only difference is we’ve enabled the logic to connect to our internal scheduling database). That database code is included in the open-source snapshot as an example…and one day, I hope someone (maybe myself) finds the time to get TTPUB connected to a GTFS database ala http://gtfsdb.com.