To help you get started as an Urban Mobility Architect, we’ve put together this quick guide to the terms we use every day. Here is your quick reference guide:
- Agency: The company that runs the transit service (like the MTA or Transport for London). Everything starts here! 🏢
- Alighting or drop off: The act of getting off a vehicle.
- Ambassador: These are our most experienced Mooviters. They’re the "guardians" of their city’s data and the main bridge between local mappers and the official Moovit Team.
- Boarding or pick up: The act of getting onto a vehicle.
- Calendar: The set of rules for when a line runs (e.g., "Weekdays only" or "Saturdays"). Without a calendar, the system won't know when to show the line to riders. 🗓️
- Calendar Exception: feature used to identify days that deviate from a calendar's standard departure pattern
- Close stops are situations where two or more stops (of any transit type) are located less than 5 meters from each other.
- Departure times: term used to indicate the time a trip departs from a specific stop for a specific trip on a route.
- ETA: Estimated Time of Arrival
- Frequency / Interval Times: Instead of fixed departure times, some lines operate based on frequency (e.g., every 10 minutes). It represents the waiting time between one vehicle and the next. ⏱️
- GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification): The worldwide standard format for public transit data files. Think of it as the universal "language" that transit agencies use to tell Google, Apple, and Moovit where the lines and schedules are. When we import these files, the map fills up with all the right info automatically. 🤖📄
- Interval Patterns: are trips with the same sequence of stops but different travel times between them
- Interval Times: amount of time it takes for a vehicle to travel from one stop to the next.
- Line: The transit service itself (e.g., Blue Line or Bus 101). A Line always belongs to an Agency. 🚌
- Mooviter That’s you! A dedicated community member who uses their local knowledge to help millions of passengers get where they need to go by using the Moovit Editor to map stops, routes, and schedules.
- Mooviter’s Page: it is the place where you will be connected with other members of the Moovit mapping community in your city
- Official Data: Information straight from city halls or transit companies. This is our "source of truth"—we always trust this first to make sure the app is as accurate as possible. 🏛️✅
- Schedules / Timetables: The exact departure times for each trip. This is what passengers check to know when the bus leaves the terminal. 🕒
- Service Alert: alerts displayed in the app to inform users about irregularities in normal service
- Shape Issue occurs when the visual representation of a route on the map (the "shape") does not accurately align with the actual path the vehicle takes or the positions of the stops.
- Short Term Change (STC) is our way of updating the app with temporary modifications to transit data (GTFS).
- Stop: The physical location where the passenger waits. It can be a bus pole, a shelter, or a subway station. 📍
- Trip: A specific instance of that line at a certain time (e.g., the 08:00 AM trip of Bus 101). 🕒
- Shape: The line drawn on the map showing the exact path the vehicle takes through the streets. 🗺️
- Pattern: The logical sequence of stops for a trip. If a bus skips a stop, it follows a different "Pattern." 🔗
- Moderation: The review process, where experienced editors check if the data is correct before it goes live on the app. ⚖️