June/July in KDE Itinerary

Saturday, 2 August 2025  |  Volker Krause

Since the last update two months ago KDE Itinerary got support for manually added train and bus trips, a more flexible alternative connection search, a new departure details view and a better location search, among many other improvements.

New Features

Manual trip entry

Being able to manually enter train or bus trips rather than selecting them from timetable data has been often requested and is now finally available.

Context (sub)menu for adding manual entries.
New menu for adding manual train, bus, ferry or flight connections.

For all modes of transportation there’s now two modes, manually entered data where you can freely change departure and arrival locations and times, and schedule-backed data for trips added from public transport searches where you can change the departure and arrival stops only based on what’s actually in the schedule.

The latter is now also available for ferry trips.

London ferry connection shown with the same level of detail Itinerary previously supported for trains and busses.
Intermediate stops for a ferry.

The the various add and import actions have also been consolidated in a single menu on the trip page. Importing backups remains available on the My Data page.

Context menu containing all add and import actions.
New combined add/import context menu.

The alternative connection search is no longer limited to just trains and busses either, it now can also be applied to ferry trips and flights. Likewise all modes of transportation in the result can be added that way, that is also ferries and flights.

Additionally, the alternative connection search now allows to select any transfer stop as the destination, unlike previously being limited to just the first or the last one.

Popup menu showing all transfer stops along a trip as possible destination.
Destination selector in alternative connection search.

New public transport departures view

There’s also an entirely new and much more detailed public transport departures view. You’ll find that behind the new context menu on locations in the details pages.

Context menu containing actions related to a train station.
New location context menu.

The departure list now automatically updates when looking at current departures. Also, you can select an individual entry to get a whole set of additional information where available:

  • Service notes and alerts.
  • Occupancy levels.
  • The full trip run in a schedule view and and as a map.
  • The exact departure location on an indoor station map.
Detailed information for a single train departure.
New departure details page.

Events

Earlier this month we had the first Transitous Hack Weekend covering many topics relevant for Itinerary as well, ranging from making Transitous long-term sustainable over improving the data coverage and quality to expanding the routing capabilities.

There’s two important upcoming events:

I'm going to Akademy 2025!

Infrastructure Work

Everything mentioned in this section also benefits KTrip.

Geocoding

Geocoding is the process that happens behind the location search for journey planning. That produced some confusing and undesired results in the past, and should noticeably improve with the 25.08 release.

  • MOTIS, Transitous and KPublicTransport gained support for geographic bias areas for geocoding queries. That’s used in the location search based on the selected country. With this you should now always have results from the right country at the top, while still not having a hard filter which can be inconvenient in border areas.

  • Improved automatic backend selection for geocoding. This should fix the issue that in some countries locations were only searched in a few small regions rather than the entire area. Italy and the US were affected by this for example.

  • The city, region and country a result is in are now display in more cases in a second line under the address or station name. This should further help to disambiguate results.

Online updates for public transport backend configurations

Access to public transport data still depends on over 70 operator services, besides Transitous. Many of those aren’t really meant for 3rd party use and thus have no proper change management, which means they can randomly change their URL, need a new custom certificate, need new or changed parameters or just disappear entirely.

Adapting to a lot of that is merely a matter of changing configuration files part of KPublicTransport, but so far it would take up to a month for those changes to reach users of release packages.

As this can severely impact the functionality we now have the infrastructure to update the KPublicTransport backend configuration files as well as supporting data such as the coverage information without waiting for the next software update.

This is meant to happen automatically eventually, while we are still testing this it’s available as a context action in the public transport backend configuration page.

Pickup/dropoff constraints

Another new feature in MOTIS and Transitous are pickup and dropoff constraints. That is, a way to describe that you cannot board or cannot alight from a vehicle at a given stop. While that isn’t all that common, it can be quite important to know.

KPublicTransport also gained support for this, besides MOTIS also for OpenTripPlanner and Hafas backends. In the UI you can see this in a few places then:

  • Changing the departure or arrival stop when editing only allows to select those stops that actually allow boaring/alighting respectively.
  • Stops that allow neither boarding nor alighting are shown as such in the journey overview. This sometimes occurs for border crossings or Switzerland advertising significant rail infrastructure.
Train trip with two dummy stops for borders that do not allow alighting/boarding.
Intermediate stops not allowing boarding or alighting.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

  • Added or improved travel document extractors for Amadeus, Arriva, BlablaBus, booking.com, DB, Deutscher Alpenverein, DJH, DSB, Easyjet, Eurostar, Finnair, Flixbus, Globtour, Gopass, hostelworld, Leo Express, LeShuttle, MÁV, Opodo, Ouigo ES, Reenio, SNCB, SCNF, tickets.ua and Tito.
  • Improved matching and merging of bound and unbound train/bus trips.
  • Improved matching and merging of seat reservations with seats listed in different orders.

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

Public transport data

  • New or fixed backend configurations for KVB, South Tyrol, ZKS and the Varsinais-Suomen OpenTripPlanner instance.
  • Onboard API support for XiamenAir.
  • Fix parsing of bike carriage and wheelchair accessibility capabilities from OpenTripPlanner.
  • Fix parsing of flight numbers from Entur.
  • Support for more vehicle features from DB.
  • Correctly update country coverage list in the stop picker when enabling/disabling backends.
  • Filter out journey results with implausibly long detours. This gets rid of the “creative” connections between the major stations in Paris by backends that can’t do local transport routing there.
  • Fix parsing of operator names from EFA.

Train station maps

  • Support for more OSM tagging schemes for elevators, tram infrastructure and platform sections.
  • Improved matching of platform names when faced with language specific leading abbreviations.
  • Cancel ongoing tile downloads before starting a new map load.
  • Better recovery from OSM level range tagging mistakes.
  • Better recovery from failed tile downloads.

Itinerary app

  • Added several more export options: Wallet passes, program memberships and standalone passes can now also be exported, and single reservations can be exported as GPX file.
  • Reworked journey progress display, which is now active in all journey views and should be much more reliable especially in the timeline view.
  • Standalone Wallet passes can now also be updated explicitly when containing an online update URL.
  • Improved default zoom in the journey and trip map views.
  • Fixed display of addresses with unresolved ISO 3166-2 region codes.
  • Determine a correct trip end time in more cases.
  • Fixed price display when there’s no home country configured.
  • Also show notes/service alerts in the stop info dialog on the journey map.
  • Fixed handling of Wallet passes with a case-sensitive identifier.

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.

See also the recent posts on how you can add public transport data to Transitous and do OSM indoor mapping.