April/May in KDE Itinerary

The past two months since the last update have been busy again around KDE Itinerary, with additional train and bus trip editing capabilities, a new departures view, OpenRailwayMap integration and a ton of new features in Transitous.

New Features

Lengthening train and bus trips

Changing the departure and arrival of train or bus trips so far only allowed to shorten the trip, that is board later or alight earlier. That limitation was caused by not having information about the full run of a train or bus, so we didn’t know what possible stops existed before the original departure or after the original arrival.

That has changed now for some public transport backends at least, and it’s thus also possible to change to an earlier departure stop or a later arrival stop.

The journey details view for train and bus trips now also shows the full trip of the corresponding vehicle.

New departures view

The public transport departures view has been updated to match the Kirigami FormCard style used in most other places, and to align Itinerary with what KTrip is using.

OpenRailwayMap integration

The live status map showing the position, speed and heading of the train, bus or plane you are currently on now offers additional map styles from OpenRailwayMap. That’s an OSM-based map that has dedicated views for railway infrastructure, signaling, track gauge, electrification and track speed rating. All of those can be selected in Itinerary’s live map as well now when on a train.

While a rather special interest feature on first sight, the track speed rating view has already proven to be rather useful for assessing the reliability of delay estimates, as you’ll easily see if the current speed is matching the currently possible maximum or whether you’ll likely be falling behind schedule further.

Events

There’s two upcoming events very relevant for Itinerary:

• On July 11th-13th we’ll have the first Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, Germany.
• On October 17th/18th there’s the first Open Transport Community Conference in Vienna, Austria.

Infrastructure Work

Transitous and MOTIS

MOTIS, the routing engine used by Transitous, has been rapidly gaining features:

• Support for GTFS-Fares v2, that is information about costs and ticket options for trips.
• Support for GTFS-RT service alerts, that is (textual) information describing disruptions or other service changes.
• Support for GTFS-RT cancelled and additional services.
• Support for GTFS-Flex, that is information about on-demand mobility services.
• Considering terrain elevation in bike and foot routing.
• Considering car carriage services such as ferries and car transport trains in car routing.

Some of these features are already benefiting Itinerary users, some will need work on the Transitous side to extend the import pipeline or to add additionally needed data feeds, and some still need client-side work to properly retrieve and display the new information.

Shared UI between Itinerary and KTrip

There’s renewed effort to share more of the public transport UI components between Itinerary and KTrip, mostly in the KPublicTransport library.

So far this covered:

• The stop picker page.
• The backend configuration page.
• Parts of the vehicle layout and departure/arrival board views.

Some of the custom date/time formatting functions used here are also upstreamed into KCoreAddons’s KFormat API.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Add or improved travel document extractors for American Airlines, a&o hostels, booking.com, Deutsche Bahn, Eventbrite, Eventlook, Flixbus, Gastronovi, IHG, Kolumbus ferries, ÖBB, SNCF, Stena Line, Tallink, Tootoot.fm and Viking Line.
• Improved generic extractor for FCB and DOSIPAS ticket barcodes.
• Significantly expanded documentation for writing extractor scripts, thanks to Grzegorz Mu.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• New or improved onboard API support for ÖBB and Ouigo ES.
• Fixed path plausibility check erroneously purging circular paths.
• Fixed mode of transport filters on EFA backends.
• Added support for service alerts and canceled trips/stops on MOTIS backends.
• Added support for occupancy information on OpenTripPlanner backends.
• Added support for localized headsign information on OpenTripPlanner backends.
• Improved automatic backend selection when start and destination are part of different coverage regions.
• Fixed parsing of geocoding replies from MOTIS missing some address information.
• Fixed misleading error messages when no results could be found.
• Fixed coverage metadata for Estonia.
• Improved trip matching when having to fall back from trip queries to journey routing.
• Improved parsing of night train coaches from ÖBB’s vehicle layout API.

Itinerary app

• Improved geo coding and address editing, including a fix for QtLocation not forwarding Nominatim house numbers correctly.
• Improved applying live updates to multi-ticket trips.
• Warn when trying to import data exported by a newer version of Itinerary.
• Fixed barcode scan mode button overlapping other page elements even when fully scrolled down.
• Fixed statistics display if no country has been visited yet.
• Also check for updates for newly imported reservations in the far future.
• Fixed display of arrival stop notes.
• Improved trip group action state handling for about to end trips.
• Show ticket validity times when available.
• Fixed display of train destinations in the coach layout view.
• Improved display of closed coaches in the vehicle layout view.
• Fixed creating ferry trips without an arrival time.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.