What is an agency
?#
Agency
is a term that is used often across the Cal-ITP project but depending on the context of its use, it can have varying meanings when conducting an analysis.
Inconsistent use of the term agency
can be confusing, so this section of the documentation seeks to help analysts determine how to translate the use of the word agency
in research requests depending on the area of focus that the research request falls into.
Area of Focus |
How to Identify an |
---|---|
Organizations |
Within the California Transit Base, organizations can represent transit agencies or other organizations that don’t provide transit service. Some of these entities may “manage” several transit services. Some of these organizations have a built-in crosswalk to NTD data via the |
Services |
Within the California Transit Base, services represent a type of transit “product” that people can use to travel. Services are differentiated if there is a difference in any of the following characteristics:
Examples of services for OCTA:
|
NTD Agencies |
Within the NTD data in the warehouse, there are various organizations that have provided transit data on an agency-wide basis. These organizations are all associated with each other via an “NTD ID”. These NTD Agencies can be linked to California Transit organizations by joining the |
GTFS Datasets |
For both GTFS Static and GTFS Real-Time data, when trying to analyze GTFS datasets it is easiest to think of
|
GTFS-Provider-Service Relationships |
In the warehouse, this is the relationship between
|
AgencyID Dataset |
The Transit Data Quality Team produced a dataset crosswalk in Airtable between 5 tables representing “organizations” in different internal Caltrans systems. Some of these systems had multiple records for a single entity. This dataset is not updated on a regular basis. |
Other Datasets |
Depending on the data you are using, defining an agency can change. In most cases, an
|
Note: Defining your unit of analysis within your analyses — whether it be agency
or organization
or another term — can help clarify how you are using the term.