Adding public transport data to Transitous

Summary

I had mentioned a number of new Transitous features in a previous post. As those largely depend on the corresponding data being available, here’s an overview of how you can help to find, add and improve that data. Transitous Transitous is a community-run public transport routing service build on top of the MOTIS routing engine and thousands of datasets from all over the world. Transitous backs public transport related features in applications like GNOME Maps, KDE Itinerary or Träwelling. Just like OpenStreetMap this needs people on the ground identifying issues or gaps in the data, figuring out where things go wrong and who to talk to at the local operators to get things fixed. The first step to help is just comparing data you get from Transitous with the reality around you, ie. does the public transport schedule match what’s actually happening, and are all relevant services included? If there’s things missing or outdated, a list of the types of datasets consumed by Transitous, and how to inspect and add those, follows below. The central part in this are a bunch of JSON files in the Transitous Git repository, which define all the datasets to be used as well as a few parameters and metadata for those. Once a day those are then retrieved, validated, filtered and post-processed for importing into MOTIS by Transitous’ import pipeline. Public transport schedules The backbone of public transport routing is static GTFS schedule data, that’s the bare minimum for Transitous to work in a region. GTFS feeds are essentially zip files containing a set of CSV tables, making them relatively easy to inspect, although especially nationwide aggregated feeds can get rather large. GTFS feeds ideally contain data for several months into the future, but can nevertheless receive regular updates. Transitous checks for updates daily, so for this to work practically we also need a stable URL for them (that might seem obvious to you, but apparently not to all feed providers…). We currently ha...