Transitous

Free and open public transport routing.

Goal

A community-run provider-neutral international public transport routing service.

Using openly available GTFS/GTFS-RT/etc. feeds and FOSS routing engine we want to operate a routing service that:

• focuses on the interest of the user rather than the public transport operators
• is free to use
• values user privacy
• does not stop at borders
• aims at crowd-sourced maintenance of data feeds in the spirit of FOSS

Contact

For general discussions about data availability: #opentransport:matrix.org

For Transitous-specific technical topics: #transitous:matrix.spline.de

Adding a region

Transitous data sources are divided by region, so they can be continuously tested and verified by locals.

All the data from a specific region is stored in a region file, located in the feeds directory. This region file is a json file, which is named after the unique country ISO_3166-1 code or the unique principal subdivision ISO_3166-2 code (for example for US states).

A region file has a maintainers attribute, which contains a list of people responsible for keeping the feeds for the region up to date.

{
    "maintainers": [ ... ],
    "sources": [ ... ]
}

A person is represented like this:

{
    "name": "< name of the maintainer >",
    "github": "< github username of the maintainer >"
}

The main attribute of a region is sources. It contains a list of feeds that should be fetched.

Each source can either be of type "transitland-atlas" or "http". A transitland-atlas source is a feed from Transitland, identified by its Onestop ID.

{
    "name": "<name to be used for the output filename, should not contain spaces>",
    "type": "transitland-atlas",
    "transitland-atlas-id": "<onestop id>"
}

If the feed is not known in Transitland, a http source can be used instead.

{
    "name": "<name to be used for the output filename>",
    "type": "http",
    "url": "https://<url of GTFS file>",
    "license": {
        "spdx-identifier": "<license identifier from https://spdx.org/licenses/ if known>",
        "url": "< url as source for the license if available >"
    }
}

In both cases, the name needs to be unique in the file, except for if it is an GTFS-RT feed. These are realtime feeds that contain updates for a GTFS feed. In order to know which one to apply the updates to, the names must match.

If the feed contains errors, you can try to add the "fix": true attribute, to try to automatically correct errors.

Once you create a pull request, fetching your feed will automatically be tested.

You can also test it locally. For that, first get an up to date copy of transitland-atlas:

git submodule update --remote --checkout --init

You also need to have gtfsclean installed. We provide a static build for linux so you don't need to build your own.

wget -P ~/.local/bin https://github.com/public-transport/gtfsclean/releases/download/snapshot-3/gtfsclean
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/gtfsclean

You can also use the container described below.

Then you can fetch individual regions using

./src/fetch.py feeds/<region>.json

More source options

There are all kinds of options that may be specified in a source:

Option Name	Description
type	http, transitland-atlas or url. Url sources are not downloaded, but passed to MOTIS as URL. This is used for realtime feeds.
spec	gtfs or gtfs-rt. gtfs-rt may only be used when type is url.
fix	Fix / drop fields that are not correct.
skip	Don't download or use this feed.
skip-reason	Reason for why this feed can't be used right now.
fix-csv-quotes	Try to fix GTFS files in which fields are improperly quoted. A symptom of this is if stop names start containing CSV.
license	Dictionary of license-related options
http-options	Dictionary of HTTP-related options
drop-shapes	Remove route shapes, use if the shapes are mostly wrong

License Options

Option Name	Description
spdx-identifier	License identifier from https://spdx.org/licenses/
url	Website that states the License of the data

HTTP Options

Option Name	Description
headers	Dictionary of custom HTTP headers to send when checking for updates / downloading.
ignore-tls-errors	Ignore expired / invalid TLS certificate
fetch-interval-days	Fetch this feed at most every n days. Useful if a server doesn't send Last-Modified, or to comply with terms of service.

Common Patterns

You can use http-options even with transitland-atlas-id. This is useful for passing in things like headers with API keys.

{
    "name": "Example-Feed",
    "type": "transitland-atlas",
    "transitland-atlas-id": "example-feed-id",
    "http-options": {
        "headers": {
            "api-key": "key"
        }
    }
}

Running a transitous instance locally

Running a local instance of the transitous setup can be useful for debugging. The easiest way is to use the same container image that we use for fetching and importing the data on the CI.

First, ensure that you have the Git submodules:

git submodule update --remote --checkout --init

Proceed by building the container:

podman build ci/container/ -t transitous -f ci/container/Containerfile

Enter the container:

podman run -it -p 8080:8080 -v $PWD:/transitous:Z --userns=keep-id -w /transitous transitous

Now inside the container, you can download and post-process all the feeds. This may take a while.

./ci/fetch-feeds.py timer

The out/ directory should now contain a number of zip files.

In addition to those, you also need a background map. Importing all of europe would take too long, so for now, use a smaller region. You can find working map pbf downloads at Geofabrik. You can click on the region names to find downloads for smaller subregions.

Then download the chosen region:

wget https://download.geofabrik.de/europe/germany/berlin-latest.osm.pbf -P out
wget https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de/download/land-polygons-complete-4326.zip -P out

In order to start motis, we need a config file listing all the feeds we want to use. You can generate one using our script:

./src/generate-motis-config.py full

The generated config file still needs a small adjustment. Edit the line in out/config.ini that starts with paths=osm to point to your map.

You can then go to the out directory, and start motis:

cd out
motis -c config.ini --server.host 0.0.0.0 --server.static_path /opt/motis/web

The first start will take a while, as it imports all the maps and feeds. Once it's done, the motis web interface should be reachable on localhost:8080.