kkremitzki/transitous

Free and open public transport routing.

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

• Matrix channel: #opentransport:matrix.org (for now)

Adding a region

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

A region file in the feeds directory 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, by running ./src/fetch.py feeds/<region>.json.

For that you need to have gtfstidy installed. You can also use the container described below.

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 just 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

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.