Enable Flex Routing

[hamouda99]

I want to use Motis for a hail-and-ride service. So the service run vehicles on a fixed route and passengers can pickup/drop off the bus at any place along the fixed route. I have seen that GTFS format (linked here https://gtfs.org/documentation/schedule/reference/#stop_timestxt) is describing it inside the file stop_times.txt adding additional columns which are "continuous_pickup" and "continuous_drop_off" and setting them to 0.
I tried updating my GTFS files to use this flag, but I didn't see any result after running my Motis server. Is there any "Flex" field to be enabled in the Motis configuration file?
I tried analyzing all the documentation but I didn't find anything useful. I would appreciate any suggestion to implement this service.

[felixguendling]

MOTIS does not support continuous_pickup and continous_dropoff yet. You could either add a lot of "virtual" stops every 100m along the route (and remove then from the response afterwards) to have the same effect (which works also for transfers between those trips) or use GTFS Flex (which only works for first/last mile).

[Lach-anonym]

Doesn't also the direct connection between the points using DRT work? In only one zone ofc

[felixguendling]

Since the information was this:

along the fixed route

I concluded that there is no "zone" but basically a network of lines.

Similar to mini bus systems in many parts of the world.

[hamouda99]

Thank you Felix for your detailed explanation. Will try adding some frequent stops. As far as you know, how this could impact the performance and memory usage? Consider that in my case I could have a network of more than 1000km, so having stops with a frequency of 100mt for example, could lead to a huge amount of stops.

[felixguendling]

You could try to experiment and vary the distance from 100m to 1km and see what works best regarding performance vs result quality tradeoff. On transitous.org MOTIS runs with >4 million stops, so I think if you have 1000km with something between 2-10 stops per km you end up with 10k stops which should not cause any performance problems.

[hamouda99]

Perfect. Thank you for your suggestion!