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It's night time in Hong Kong. The run-down street looks cool in a urban-decayish kind of way. A blue double-decker tram sticks out in the foreground with a its splash of bright colour. On the front of it, it says "Explore New Possibilities" in white capital letters. Ain't that true.
Open DataSoftware

This weekend I am contributing to Transitous. You should too.

Paul

Transitous is a new community-driven free and open source routing service. App developers can integrate the real-time location and direction of public transport vehicles into their software, allowing their users to plan their journeys accordingly.

As a proof of concept, you can browse a very basic example web app or play around with a simple Android demo.

A view of MOTIS centered over the city of Valencia. Little orange arrows indicate individual buses. Red arrows show intercity trains arriving and leaving the city.
I added all city buses in Valencia (Spain) to Transitous with just 5 lines of JSON. Making a big difference requires very little effort.

Although used to provide information for KDE’s Itinerary app, the service is open to everyone and is literally a group effort. It can improve any travel assistant app without forcing developers to personally add literally hundreds of sources themselves.

That is, if we, the community, contribute the links to the data. You see, Transitous relies on users to help populate the files for different countries with the links provided by public and private transport companies and organisations.

At the moment there is no graphical way to do this, but even if your knowledge of JSON is very basic (like mine), and as long as you have a GitHub account, you can help by following some simple instructions.

4 thoughts on “This weekend I am contributing to Transitous. You should too.”

    • There is no app as such. The MOTIS demo is a proof of concept. It shows how the data could possibly be visualised, as moving arrows on a map, but you can’t really do much with it. This technology will get incorporated into proper travel assistant apps, like Itinerary, which is available from F-Droid.

  • @Paul Transitous is a collaboration between different FOSS transport apps and others needing such a service, KDE is part of this from the beginning but we didn't start this on our own 🙂

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