Recommended use cases for boarding_areas in GTFS

[vicentecamposquezada]

Hi,
I’m working with Metro de Santiago (Chile), where we’ve recently been improving our GTFS by modeling station infrastructure in much more detail.
One of the things we implemented was boarding_areas on platforms. In our case, all stations have at least one boarding area per platform, and most have three (center, and one at each end of the platform). All trains stop at the same position, and passengers can board from any of these boarding areas.
However, we’re still not fully sure how boarding_areas are used in practice by trip planners and other GTFS consumers.
I wanted to ask:
• Are they mainly intended for in-vehicle positioning or passenger guidance within the platform?
• How are they typically used in routing or accessibility use cases?
• Are there recommended practices or examples where they make a clear difference?
For reference, this is the GTFS feed we are working with (published by DTPM, including Metro): https://www.dtpm.cl/index.php/noticias/gtfs-vigente
Any guidance or examples would be very helpful. Thanks.

[leonardehrenfried]

Boarding areas are not used very much.

In ~ 8 years of looking at feeds I have only seen them a handful of times.

I see two use cases:

• A platform is split into several sectors (1A, 1B, 1C...) and trains stop at these sectors and you can have several trains at the same time. In this case you could split up the platform but you could also model it as several stops.
• There is special equipment for accessible boarding of trains in one part of the platform but not the other. This to me seems to be the only case which makes a lot of sense to me. Very few agencies have the data at this level of precision.