mobroute

README

Mobroute

Mobroute is a minimal FOSS public-transportation router and suite of tools allowing you to route between locations by using public transportation data (GTFS) data. GTFS feeds are automatically fetched from the from the Mobility Database and the application is designed to have as few 'knobs' to adjust before being practically useful. The core of the routing algorithm is based on the Connection Scan Algorithm. Mobroute also provides auxiliary support for functionality using the same GTFS data including: stop times / timetables lookups for nearby stations, assistance finding all nearby stations.

Currently Mobroute is in active development and as such is primarily aimed at early adopters and those who wish to help with testing. In it's current state Mobroute is an alpha stage, routing works for select metros and features are being built out based on the roadmap doc. See the mailing list note for historical project details.

The Mobroute project is composed of 3 separate codebases / smaller projects:

• Mobsql: is a GTFS-to-SQL ETL tool which pulls GTFS sources from the MobilityDB into a SQLite database. It exposes both a CLI & a Go library (consumed by Mobroute).
• Mobroute: is the core routing tool. This project handles interfacing Mobsql via its public Go API and then once the DB is loaded, opens the DB and performs routing calculations (currently via the Connection Scan Algorithm). It exposes both a CLI & a Go library ( consumed by Transito).
• Transito: is a simple Android & Linux GUI app to use Mobroute. It allows querying from/to via Nominatim and performing routing calculations on-the-go via Mobroute's underlying routing mechanism (note this implicitly integrates Mobsql as well).

Featureset

Below is an overview of the main features of Mobroute:

• Well-executed singlemodal public transportation routing via GTFS data
  • Project focuses on implementing only GTFS routing providing for algorithmic & codebase simplicity
  • Other routers bill themselves as "multimodal"; Mobroute is proudly singlemodal (doesn't integrate automobile/OSM/PBF data)
  • Overall.. does one thing well: public transportation routing
• Integration of automatic GTFS dataimport & ETL out-of-the-box via the Mobility Database
  • Frees user from having to source & manually download/import GTFS zip archives
  • System automatically downloads the data needed for a routing requests upon use
  • Supports using multiple GTFS sources independently and in combination for single routing requests
  • See Mobsql for details on ETL pipeline, uses SQLite under the hood
• Efficient algorithmic routing via the Connection Scan Algorithm (CSA)
  • Being a singlemodal router lends Mobroute's design to implementation simplicity
  • The well academically studied CSA algorithm is utilized: see paper details here
  • CSA is non-graphbased, simple, and Mobroute's CSA implementation is well tested
• Targeted to on-device and offline usage
  • Designed to be used on-device and offline once data is fetched
  • Run your routing request right on your mobile device for the privacy conscious
• Fully thought-out small, simple, & modular design supporting library, CLI, & mobile usage
  • Built in Go, the design of the project is small and modular
  • 3 primary components:
    • Mobsql (GTFS-to-SQLite ETL pipeline)
    • Mobroute (Core routing algorithm via CSA)
    • Transito (Graphical mobile application for Android & Linux)
  • Mobsql and Mobroute can be used as both a CLI OR as a Go API as a library in your application
  • Transito, Mobroute's mobile application is written in Go (via Gio) and uses Mobroute's API

How to Use Mobroute

Currently there are three primary ways to use Mobroute: (1) via a mobile (and desktop) graphical application for Android & Linux named Transito, (2) via Mepo, the graphical Linux OSM app, using from/to prompts (via a GTK GUI), and (3) via the commandline. Eventually a Go API will also be stabilized and accessible for usage in custom applications.

See documentation for each usage pattern below:

• Transito: Use Mobroute via its graphical Android & Linux application
• Mepo Integration: Use Mobroute to calculate a route and plot the result in the Linux OSM app, Mepo
• CLI: Use Mobroute's commandline interface directly

Working Routing Requests

The routing request for the below select metros have been smoketested and are known to generate functional routes. Any valid GTFS source from the Mobility Database should work with Mobroute - however these examples have been explicitly tested against. Add your metro example here. The purpose of this section is for end-users to get a sense of capabilities of Mobroute's routing API in terms of inputs and outputs. Note that dataload from the Mobility Database is a fully automated process so simply plugging a YML request buffer similar to the buffers below into Mobroute is all you need to start generate working routes in a single command.

The request YML examples shown below can be plugged into Mobroute on the commandline using mobroute route -p 'YML' or the same parameters may be used in Transito.

Mdbid	Country	Municipality	Name	From	To	Request YML	Output
516	US	New York City	MTA New York City Transit (MTA): NYC Subway	40.70940, -74.00537	40.72879, -73.95215	{filter: {mdbid: [516] }, from: {lat: 40.70940, lon: -74.00537}, to: {lat: 40.72879, lon: -73.95215}, time: 2023-12-27T15:04:05Z}	Output
1270	PL	Kraków	Zarząd Transportu Publicznego w Krakowie (ZTP Kraków): Tram	50.012338, 19.88192	50.08785, 20.02387	{filter: {mdbid: [1270]}, from: {lat: 50.012338, lon: 19.88192}, to: {lat: 50.08785, lon: 20.02387}, time: 2023-12-27T15:04:05Z}	Output
1088	BE	Bruxelles	Société des Transports Intercommunaux de Bruxelles/Maatschappij voor het Intercommunaal Vervoer te Brussel (STIB/MIVB)	50.85728, 4.351426	50.83214, 4.350534	{filter: {mdbid: [1088]}, from: {lat: 50.85728, lon: 4.351426}, to: {lat: 50.83214, lon: 4.350534}, time: 2023-12-27T15:04:05Z}	Output
1898	FR	Bourges	Agglobus	47.07199, 2.40154	47.10811, 2.41974	{filter: {mdbid: [1898]}, from: {lat: 47.07199, lon: 2.40154}, to: {lat: 47.10811, lon: 2.41974}, time: 2023-12-27T15:04:05Z}	Output
1032	PT	Unset	Carris	38.7376, -9.1725	38.72329, -9.14646	{filter: {mdbid: [1032]}, from: {lat: 38.7376, lon: -9.1725}, to: {lat: 38.72329, lon: -9.14646}, time: 2023-12-27T15:04:05Z, max_transfer_seconds: 600}	Output

Multiples sources can be used in a single routing request as well. The most efficient path will be generated with transfers taken between the seperate providers when this is the most efficient route, examples below:

Mdbid	Country	Municipality	Name	From	To	Request YML	Output
509 + 516	US + US	Unset + New York City	New Jersey Transit (NJ Transit): Rail + MTA New York City Transit (MTA): NYC Subway	40.64809, -73.93799	40.82732, -74.12064	{filter: {mdbid: [509, 516]}, from: {lat: 40.64809, lon: -73.93799}, to: {lat: 40.82732, lon: -74.12064}}	Output

Known Limitations

As the Mobroute project is a work in progress overall there are a number of known defects and limitations to note. See the roadmap doc for details on planned features and overall project state. This list is in supplement to the roadmap in order to provide a simple readable format of known limitations to set expectations if you are trying Mobroute locally or using Transito on your mobile device.

• The SQLite database is stored uncompressed and the schema used is currently relatively unoptimized. Thus the DB size is several factors larger then it needs to be and devices with small storage capacities may struggle or fail in load.
• Large GTFS archive sources may fail or take a long time to load. Extracted stop_times.txt up to ~200MB or so have been successfully tested locally and larger sources should work; but this is dependent on local resources.
• GTFS feeds not providing transfers.txt & multiple-GTFS feed requests, e.g. using generated transfers is relatively unoptimized and can be slow to load dependent on the threshold set for max_transfer_seconds; if you want to use multiple feeds or generated transfers quickly, set max_transfer_seconds to a lower value.
• GTFS sources with multiple agencies provided in the GTFS agency.txt table may not produce accurate routes as this is unaccounted for in loading.
• Routing requests currently do not work beyond the boundaries of a single day (thus requests just before midnight may produce invalid routes).
• Indexes are maintained during load and compute stages (thus producing much slower then possible import speeds); the more data you import into the system, likely the slower subsequent imports will be.
• It is difficult given the current design of Mobsql's filter specification to load certain sources together outside of manually addressing sources by mdbid (better and/or logic design is needed here).
• The design of the routing runtime, first loading the data needed into memory and then executing the routing request needs to be rethought. CSA (the routing algorithm) is quite fast; while the most costly piece of routing is loading to memory the data needed (which is cachable/memoizable) but is currently not treated as cached and always runs for all requests on the CLI & in Transito.
• As of 0.2, the stops and stoptimes commands are nonfunctional as formatting and the codebase as a whole was reworked; these commands will be added back in the future

Demo Videos

Note these demo videos are considered historical at this point and new videos need to be produced at some point. These videos show a very early conception of Mobroute's functionality.

• Mobroute CLI Demo Video
• Mobroute Mepo Integration Demo Video

Contribute

Important Links:

• Mailing List: https://lists.sr.ht/~mil/mobroute-devel
• Tickets: https://todo.sr.ht/~mil/mobroute-tickets
• Development Guide: https://git.sr.ht/~mil/mobroute/tree/master/item/doc/devguide.md
• IRC: #mepo on irc.oftc.net

The primary targets for development over the next number of months can be seen on the roadmap doc.

If you wish to contribute features, help with testing, want to tackle something on the roadmap, or similar in order to help get Mobroute to a more usable state this help is more then welcomed. Please get in touch either on the mailing list, ticket tracker, directly via email, or reach out on IRC. I can guide you if you have technical skills and have a a particular feature you wish to contribute and if you are a non-technical user struggling with using Mobroute I may be able to help unblock you. Note for all users, this project is in active development - bug reports and patches are welcome.

As for funding, currently development is being funded by NLnet which has kindly awarded a grant to support Mobroute's development efforts as part of the NGI0 Entrust Fund under grant agreement No 101069594. If you wish to contribute financially please contact me at my publicly available email.