OSM Hack Weekend February 2026

Saturday, 28 February 2026  |  Volker Krause

Last weekend I attended another OSM Hack Weekend, hosted by Geofabrik in Karlsruhe, focusing on improvements to Transitous and KDE Itinerary.

KDE Itinerary

The Itinerary UI got a bit of polish:

  • Better defaults when importing a full trip from a previous export.
  • Better defaults when adding an entrance time to an event that doesn’t have a start time yet, also preventing invisible seconds interfering with input validation.
  • Allowing to import shortened OSM element URLs as well.

A few changes in the infrastructure for querying public transport information aren’t reflected in the UI yet:

  • Added support for GBFS brand colors.
  • Initial work on booking deep-links for journeys.

There were also a bunch of fixes in the date/time entry controls related to right-to-left layouts used by e.g. Arabic or Hebrew (affects all KDE apps using Kirigami Addons).

Screenshots of the date picker header in two left-to-right and two right-to-left locales.
Kirigami Addons date picker in French, Korean, Arabic and Hebrew.

Transitous

Ride Sharing

We investigated using Amarillo ride sharing data in Transitous, which are available for example in Baden-Württemberg, Germany and South Tyrol, Italy.

As far as Transitous is concerned those are just GTFS/GTFS-RT feeds with a special route type. Felix added a dedicated mode class for ride sharing in MOTIS, so this can also be filtered out, as well as support for passing through a booking deep-link.

So once the next MOTIS release is deployed for Transitous we can add Amarillo feeds as well.

MOTIS' journey planner UI showing a carpool connection between two cities.
A ride sharing connection in the MOTIS UI.

Meta Stations

For cities with multiple equally important main railway stations it can be useful to be able to specify just the city as destination and let the router pick an appropriate station. When choosing your precise destination (which usually isn’t the railway station) this already works correctly, but when only looking at the long-distance part of a trip this would fail for places like Paris or London.

One approach to address this are so-called “meta stations”, a set of stations that the router considers as equivalent destinations, even when being far apart.

MOTIS v2.8 added support for a custom GTFS extension to specify such meta stations, and we now have infrastructure for Transitous to generate a suitable GTFS feed based on a manually maintained map of corresponding Wikidata items, including translations into a hundred or so languages.

While this works we also identified issues in the current production deployment where the geocoder would rank meta stations so low that they are practically unfindable. Fixes for this have been implemented in MOTIS.

SIRI-FM Elevator Data

Holger and Felix implemented the missing bits for finally consuming the DB OpenStation SIRI-FM feed, which provides realtime status information of elevators, something particularly important for wheelchair routing.

The main challenge here is that the SIRI-FM feed only references elevators by an identifiers which is described in the DB OpenStation NeTEx dataset, but without being geo-referenced there. So this data had to be mapped to OSM elements first, which is what the router ultimately uses as input.

This also provides some of the foundation to eventually also consume elevator status data from the Swiss SIRI-SX feed.

You can help!

Getting people to work together in the same room for a few days is immensely valuable and productive, there’s a great deal of knowledge transfer happening, and it provides a big motivational boost.

However, physical meetings incur costs, and that’s where your donations help! KDE e.V. and local OSM chapters like the FOSSGIS e.V. support these activities.