What is an agency?

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 `agency`
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 `ntd_id_2022` column.
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: Provider of the service ”Super-mode” of the service. Whether the service is a “fixed-route” service. Whether there are different “rider requirements” that passengers must qualify for in order to ride. Often times, organizations (especially large transit agencies) will “manage” multiple services. Examples of `services` for OCTA: `Orange County Transportation Authority`: fixed-route bus service `OC Streetcar`: fixed-route streetcar service `OC ACCESS`: paratransit demand-response service `OC Flex`: a demand-response service open to public
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 `NTD ID` with `organizations.ntd_id_2022`.
GTFS Datasets	For both GTFS Static and GTFS Real-Time data, when trying to analyze GTFS datasets it is easiest to think of `agency` as “unique feed publisher”, with the exception of the combined regional feed in the Bay Area, as it is a regional reporter that publishes duplicates of other feeds that we also consume. To identify “unique feed publishers”: Decide whether customer-facing feeds or agency feeds make sense for the analysis. For data quality analyses, customer-facing is crucial; for transit planning analyses, agency subfeeds is more relevant. Deduplicate feeds
GTFS-Provider-Service Relationships	In the warehouse, this is the relationship between `organizations` and the `services` they manage. An agency can be interpreted as both depending on the use case. This is not an exhaustive list of all services managed by providers, only those that we are targeting to get into GTFS reporting. Each record defines an organization and one of it’s services. For the most part, each service is managed by a single organization with a small number of exceptions (e.g. Solano Express, which is jointly managed by Solano and Napa). In all cases, it is best to define how you are using `agency` within your analyses. Reference table: Use this table to identify provider-service relationships `cal-itp-data-infra.mart_transit_database.dim_provider_gtfs_data` Column: `organization_name` Column: `mobility_service`
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 `agency` refers to a public entity. For analyses that include non-public entities, `organization` can be used as a catch-all term to include local government agencies and other entities that may not fall under this definition of `agency`. Examples of `agency` definitions: DLA Local Public Agency: “A California City, county, tribal government or other local public agency. In many instances this term is used loosely to include nonprofit organizations.”

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.