Transitous - Free and Open Public transport routing Grazer Linuxtage 2026

FOSS applications around public transport for the longest time were stuck with using proprietary and reverse engineered APIs from transport operators that could disappear at any point without notice, and which had arbitrary product limitations or regional boundaries. Transitous is a community-run public transport routing service built with Free Software and Open Data to provide an alternative to this. Started in 2024 it meanwhile covers more 300,000 concurrent trips on an average workday in over 60 countries. In this talk we'll look at where Transitous came from, how it's built and what features it offers for use in FOSS applications. We will also cover what data it consumes and how you can contribute by adding new datasets, improving and extending exiting ones, and which aspects of OpenStreetMap (OSM) mapping are particularly relevant for routing.