Deal with fflecsi and similar on-demand services

[stupidpupil]

Fflecsi buses pick you up and drop you off in the service area and not just at a bus stop. A bus picks you up at your request, changing its route so that all passengers can get to where they need to go. fflecsi is designed to help people make essential local journeys.

https://www.fflecsi.wales/

[stupidpupil]

Community transport operators also pose an interesting challenge:
https://www.traveline.cymru/blog/2021/02/17/how-to-travel-to-your-covid-19-vaccination-appointment-using-community-transport/

[stupidpupil]

Specifically regarding fflecsi services, I've received the following response from TfW:

We don't publish this information at present but there are plans on doing so in the future.

[stupidpupil]

OpenTripPlanner v1.4 and v2.0 support (slightly?) different versions of the GTFS-flex spec.

I don't think that R5 supports GTFS-flex.

If TfW do end up providing GTFS-flex, is it possible to approximately transform it to standard GTFS for my purposes?

[stupidpupil]

One option to might be invent journeys from/to LSOA trip-points inside each on-demand service's area, and use the driving time matrix to do this (possibly with some adjustment to better reflect waiting times).

[stupidpupil]

Started scraping fflecsi services data:
https://github.com/stupidpupil/fflecsi-services/