2020-07-05 –, Track 1
Trufi Association NGO offers an open-source journey planner app for formal and informal transport, based on public transport mapped in OpenStreetMap. In this extended talk, I would like to explain, how the participants can be customize the app to their own city, region, and country.
With Trufi, mappers and developers can customize an open-source journey planner app for their own city, region or country. Especially in emergent countries in Africa, Middle and South America and Southeast Asia, where informal traffic (no stops, undocumented routes) is mainly in use.
For the public transport data part, OSM is used to map the routes, OSM2GTFS or our own tools are used to create GTFS, which is hosted in OTP. Besides the obvious tasks (map routes, customize app code), many more important steps need to be done: Get a team together, find develop perfect UX for your city, release, finance the server and map costs, do marketing, convince governments to collaborate, approach users, run analysis on data, improve OpenStreetMap routes, offer solutions for drivers, etc.
I would like to talk about these necessary steps, with stories from our implementations in Bolivia, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Colombia.
Finally, I would like to discuss in an extended Q&A part whether OpenStreetMap is made for 100s of (bus) routes - we had fruitful discussions with pros and cons on that in the talk-de mailing list in July 2019 that we could continue.
Use Trufi app to make your city's public transport better
Talk keywords:publictransport, informaltransit, emergentmarkets, routing, apps
Affiliation:Trufi Association e.V.
Co-authors:Samuel Rioja
Lukas Bordowski
Michael Brückner
Christoph Hanser is Co-founder and President of Trufi Association in Hamburg, Germany. When Christoph lived in Bolivia in 2010, he saw a great need for digital solutions to make the informal public transport system more accessible. As a public transport enthusiast he wants to reduce complexity, unreliability and make public transport more available and more attractive in cities like La Paz. For his journeys, he is mainly cycling, taking public transport and sharing a car with other families. Besides Trufi, he is the CEO of QUIBIQ Hamburg, an IT company specialised in enterprise application integration. Follow Christoph on LinkedIn or email at christoph.hanser@trufi-association.org