Public transport route planner

A public transport route planner is a type of journey planner designed to provide information about available public transport journeys, nowadays often made available as a Web application. The application prompts a user to input an origin and a destination, and uses a journey planning engine to find a route between the two using specified services using available Public Transport services. Since the choice of routes is more constrained than for a road route planner, and since it is not only about choosing a route but also about choosing a service on that route, it is also termed a journey planner instead of a route planner.

An Intermodal Journey Planner is an advanced form of route planner that supports journeys with legs using different modes of transport, such as rapid transit or metro, railways, buses and ferries. Some route planners support door-to-door planning, others only between stops on the transport network, such as stations, airports or bus stops. Time of travel may be constrained to either time of departure or arrival and other routing preferences may be specified as well.

Examples

Many transportation authorities include a public transport journey planner on their websites. For example, a municipal government responsible for bus or rail lines would have a transport planner using their services exclusively, or possibly partnering or geographically closely related services. For example, the London Tube Journey Planner offers trip planning that specifically involves the London Tube. Transport for London has a multimodal journey planner covering all modes of transport in London, including cycling. A similar journey planner with all modes included is maintained by the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Council in Finland.^[1]

Other entities, including municipal government, state and federal government, and for profit companies operate web sites offer trip planning services for large metropolitan areas, or even country-wide. For profit companies typically operate sites free to people planning trips, relying on advertising or ticketing for revenues. For example

• IDOS is a Czech website (and off-line software also) for finding train connection (including European long-distance trains) and bus connection between cities or villages as well as finding connection in single city by local transport, some cableways, ship transport, flights or combined connections. The first versions of IDOS (only for railway transport) were developed by Czech Railways (ČD) since 1997 together with the private company Chaps s.r.o. Parallelly in 1994-1998, COnet Praha s.r.o. and ČSAD SVT Praha s.r.o. developed a route planner ABUS for bus lines as an extension of AMS-BUS reservation system. In 1998, ABUS was integrated into IDOS. Since 2007, CHAPS s.r.o. remains as the only developer and operator of IDOS. Since 2006, IDOS is integrated into a private internet portal Atlas.cz, since 2007 into the news portal iDnes.cz instead. Since 2001, CHAPS s.r.o. has got an exclusive ministerial commission to operate the Statewide Informational System about Timetables (CIS JŘ) and an exclusive access to the data which are obligatorily delivered to the system by transport authorities and bus and train operators; CHAPS also proposes the obligatory structure of the data and creates the official software to official approve process for timetables. Such a commercial exploitation of public data and confusing mixture of private and public rights is a reason of legal controversies and complaints and the exclusiveness is destroyed gradually and since 2014, the legislation tends to release the pure data (pdf timetables, timetables in data format) as open data and separate them from the superstructure services as route planners. However, some experts worry that the excellent system will be ruined if the current business model will be destroyed.
• In Slovakia, there is operated a sister system CP derived from the Czech IDOS. However, data are not acquired from legal obligation but on contractual base between INPROP s.r.o., Association of Bus Transport (association of transport operators) and the appropriate ministry. http://portal.cp.sk/
• Deutsche Bahn provides rail trip planning for much of the European rail network, and local bus and metro connections within Germany.
• Costa Rica Transportation Services Find Airport Shuttles, Private Services, Car Rentals, Domestic flights and public buses information]
• UK National Rail Enquiries provides rail trip planning for the UK.
• Greater Manchester Route Explorer integrates with Google Maps and provides a more exploratory approach to aiding journey planning decisions, focussing on providing excellent User Experience to find direct bus services, with helpful asset lists of Metrolink and Rail stations to enter as your start or end location to enable multi-modal journey planning, and access Google Street View to see where to get on and off bus stops; while anticipating the user to use the tool in combination with UK National Rail Enquiries and the Metrolink System Map to pull together their complete journey requirements.
• Transport Direct is a universal transport planner for the United Kingdom; includes many modes such as car, train, bus, metro, ferry, tram, cycling, and walking.
• Resplus is a multimodal journey planner in Sweden including local city transit, long distance buses, trains and domestic flights. It is maintained by a Swedish government owned infrastructure company.
• JourneyOn is Brighton and Hove's journey planning website that provides multi-modal trip information, including real time information. JourneyOn was the UK's first door to door cycling journey planner.
• PlymGo.com is a multi-modal journey planner that leverages Google maps to allow travellers in Plymouth, Devon, UK to compare transport options (including cycling and walking)in terms of route, route gradient, cost, carbon footprint and calorie consumption.
• Québec City's transit agency (RTC) introduces Trajecto online trip planner
• Google Transit, based on Google Maps, features journey planning using data provided by a number of transit operators in the United States and elsewhere. The Google Transit Data Feed open source software project is dedicated to providing support to transit operators to transform their transit data to the Google Transit specific data feed format.
• Ecolane is a public transportation scheduling company that has many services including MDT and DRT software, as well as real-time applications that allow for easier route planning.

References

See also

• Intermodal Journey Planner, Journey planner