It has been two exciting months since the last update on KDE Itinerary again, with new vehicle and train coach amenity information, DST changes in the timeline, progress on indoor routing and most notably the founding of the Transitous project.

New Features

Train and coach amenity information

The library we use for public transport data now has a much more elaborate data model for vehicle features. That’s general comfort feature like air conditioning or Wi-Fi but also things specifically relevant when traveling with small children, a bike or a wheelchair. These can also be qualified by availability (e.g. if those need a special reservation) and can be marked as disrupted.

Itinerary makes use of this in the train coach layout view, where it’s now possible to tap on a coach for a more detailed description.

KDE Itinerary showing a details sheet about a selected train coach.
Coach feature details in Itinerary's train coach layout view.

Another place where this is used is anything showing results from journey or departure searches, such as when planning a new train trip. While all routing services provide some of this information, the level of detail can vary greatly though.

KDE Itinerary showing details about train features in journey search results.
Vehicle features in journey search results.

Since this is now available in a machine-readable form, it also becomes conceivable to allow configuring more detailed traveler profiles so Itinerary can show the information most relevant to you more prominently, or take this into consideration e.g. when automatically selecting transfer suggestions.

Daylight saving time information

Switching to and from daylight saving time happens at different times in different locations (if at all), therefore Itinerary now also displays an information for upcoming daylight saving time changes in the timeline, similar as it already does for e.g. timezone changes.

KDE Itinerary noting an upcoming daylight saving time change in the timeline.
Daylight saving time information in Itinerary's timeline.

Infrastructure Work

Transitous

The probably most significant development on the infrastructure side is the appearance of Transitous. That’s a project which started at FOSDEM 2024 barely two months ago with the aim of setting up a community-run free and open public transport routing service. It has been growing rapidly and is meanwhile a collaboration from people from many different FOSS and Open Data projects and communities.

Map of Europe showing colorful vehicle markers extending from Iceland to Croatia and from Finland to Portugal.
Current Transitous coverage for long-distance travel in Europe.

While not even having all the basic features completed yet, it nevertheless already provides value by covering a few countries where we didn’t have any public transport data at all before. Starting with 24.05 KPublicTransport will have support for Transitous enabled by default, and thus it will also become available in Itinerary and KTrip.

Unlike with vendor-operated or otherwise proprietary services it’s now possible to expand public transport data coverage ourselves, assuming publicly available GTFS feeds at least.

Indoor routing

Work on indoor routing for our train station, airport or event venue maps also continued, with the focus on turning the previously shown demo that was able to find a path from A to B into something that does that reliably and matching human expectations, which is the bulk of the work here.

Examples of this include not taking “shortcuts” through paths you shouldn’t usually take (e.g. emergency exists, or walking through conference rooms/lecture halls as pictured below), but also ensuring robustness against imperfect or incomplete map data.

Two routes through an university building in side-by-side comparison.
Shortest path (left), preferring corridors (right).

Some of this also involves clarifying or extending the OSM data model, and onsite visits to inspect challenging locations.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

  • New or improved travel document extractors for AMSBus, ANA, Deutsche Bahn, Eckerö Line, Elron, European Sleeper, Eurostar, Eventim, Finnair, Flibco, Leo Express, LTG Link, Moongate, National Express, Pasažieru vilciens, Salzbergwerk, SNCF, Thalys, ti.to, Trenitalia and UK national railways.
  • Added support for yet another variant of PDF raster images for barcode detection.
  • Improved generic extractors for flight boarding passes as well as ERA FCB and VDV train tickets.
  • Fixed the schema.org semantic annotations in the OSM event calendar.
  • Consider GIF files as well when searching for barcodes.

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

Public transport data

  • Fixed Deutsche Bahn Hafas searches sometimes not including replacement trains.
  • Fixed misdetected train coach types from UIC coach numbers.
  • Updated coverage metadata from the Transport API Repository.
  • Fixed caching of location queries and negative journey query results.
  • Improved support for arrival query result paging.
  • Updated support for ÖBB coach layout data.
  • Fixed train coach layout queries using times in the wrong timezone.

Itinerary app

  • Fixed barcode scanning on Android, caused by a regression in Qt 6.6.2 (affects all KDE apps, not just Itinerary).
  • Prevent overly large Apple Wallet pass footer images from messing up the layout.
  • Fix editing of times in AM/PM format.
  • Remember the last used folder in trip group export file dialogs.
  • Suggest meaningful file names for exporting trip groups.
  • Allow to copy the program membership number on reservation pages as well.
  • Added enough space at the end of the journey details view so floating buttons don’t overlap relevant content.
  • Added floating button to timeline page to navigate to the current element and for manually adding entries.
  • Fixed current ticket selection for elements without known arrival times.
  • Fixed retaining journey notes/vehicle layouts when getting partial trip updates.
  • Fixed displaying of departure notes for train trips.
  • Fixed displaying of public transport departure disruptions.

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.