No "emergency info" channel?

[jidanni]

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Just a dude who takes the bus. The lowest of the low.

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I notice my city (Taichung)'s official bus apps has earth shattering announcements about a particular route for that day.

E.g., "HEADS UP, 08:30 bus cancelled this morning, and due to street cave in, Smithers bus stop temporarily closed."

Yes, all the competing apps have the same information, but one needs a sharp eye to notice 08:30 is missing from today's schedule, and Smithers has disappeared from the stop list.

So this tells me the GFTS doesn't have an "emergency info" channel, (nor an emergency broadcast channel), and even if the City government wanted to play far and supply the same info to "competing" apps, there is no standard channel to do so. Please tell me I'm just paranoid. Thanks.

True, a super smart app could detect the changes to a daily routine and alert the user, but

• it would need to compare past schedules to today's to detect subtle changes.
• any such automatically detected changes would lack that personal touch of a human saying what is important.
• perhaps the best way would be a smart app that not only detects changes on its own, but also reads some future (after my brilliant idea is incorporated into the standard) announcements channel for this particular route...

[leonardehrenfried]

What about a GTFS-RT Alert where the informed entity is the route in question?

[jidanni]

I see. Looks good.
Too good: hmmm,
seems harder than just putting some words in a 21.txt file that is shown when people look up route 21, or however common office workers do alerts on their website / app.

Perhaps someone can check for me if there are any Taiwan agencies in the habit of using such channels. E.g., Taichung has population 3 million, so one would expect at least a couple of these per day.

If they don't use those channels I can urge them to.

If they do use them, then I can urge various apps to use those channels too.