Stations

A station belongs to a product and can be either real or virtual. A real station exists in the real world—for example a bus, tram, or train station—while a virtual station is a geographic point with no official station signage.

Stations are used when a product has station-to-station or hybrid matching models in its matching configuration, and for lines.

For managing stations in the UI, see Stations in ioki Operator or Stations in Control Center.

Catchment area

A station can have a catchment area: ride requests within this area are always directed to the station, even if it isn’t the nearest one. This is useful when parts of the service area have no direct road access, so requests there should be directed to a station.

Within the section Matching in the management settings of a product, there is the option Preprocess ride requests with snapping stations. Catchment areas apply regardless of whether this setting is enabled or disabled. For more information, see the description of this setting on this page.

Approach

A station’s approach defines how a vehicle accesses it: curbside, where the vehicle stops exactly at the curbside, or street, where it can stop at any side of the street.

Boarding time

A station can override the product’s default boarding time model with station-specific boarding, wheelchair, walker, and parking times.

Intermodal feeders

When intermodal journeys are active, a station can act as a feeder: it can allow transfers from public transport to DRT, from DRT to public transport, or both. For each intermodal ride, feeders are selected by their proximity to the ride’s requested origin and destination; see Feeder stations for how the selection works.

Archiving

Archiving a station is a soft removal: the station record is kept rather than permanently deleted, and the station stops being offered for new bookings.

Existing prebookings—rides booked in advance—to the station are not cancelled and complete normally. Each ride keeps the pickup and drop-off location it was booked with, so archiving the station afterward does not change or cancel it, no matter how the product matches rides to stations.

New rides cannot be booked to an archived station. A booking attempt that uses an archived station as the pickup or drop-off is rejected.