Open Trip Planner for Great Britain. Journey planning and accessibility mapping for all of GB, or parts of it, by Walking, Bicycle, Driving, and Public Transport of all forms except flying.
I've included an example Open Trip Planner instance. To run (you'll need Java installed) just type,
java -Xmx4G -jar otp-1.4.0-shaded.jar --router centredonsouthyorkshire --graphs graphs --server
into your command line.
You'll need to download this Graph.obj file and
save in graphs/centredonsouthyorkshire.
- Build and tag the docker instance
docker build . --tag otp4sy - Run the docker instance
docker run -it --rm --publish 8080:8080 otp4sy
Of course, this being docker, you can map port 8080 in the container to any other port. To run on port 80, for example, do this:
docker run -it --rm --publish 80:8080 otp4syWe want to be able to answer questions like,
- How many more people will be able to get to The Trafford Centre by public transport once the tram extension opens?
- What percentage of the population of Greater Manchester can get to Manchester City Centre within 60 minutes by both public transport and driving?
- What percentage of Leeds City Region's poorest third of areas can access Leeds City Centre within 30 minutes?
- If the UK government builds Northern Powerhouse rail, how will that change the number of people who can reach Bradford City Centre by 9am having left home at 8am?
- Which areas of Sheffield City Region have the best access to public transport?
- How many people will lose access to public transport if specific bus routes are cancelled?
- What apprenticeships and further education opportunities can people in every part of Greater Manchester access within 60 minutes of travel? And we want to do it using transparent code and open data.
There are many more questions that we know other people want to answer and by releasing the tools that let us answer our questions we hope that other people will answer theirs. Our dream is that they will then share their methods and results so that they can be re-used elsewhere.
This project lets you create an OpenTripPlanner instance for any part of Great Britain. Large areas of GB will be extremely slow.
- The Open Trip Planner instance is slow for all but the smallest geographical areas.
- The Open Trip Planner instance is slow for all but the smallest date window of analysis.
- The source files are mostly correct, but not completely correct. They probably give reasonable journey time estimates for normal weekdays, but not outside of those times.
The above limitations mean that we cannot sensibly run an Open Trip Planner server instance for the whole of GB. Doing so, even with the public transport timetables reduced to a single day, requires a server with 64GB of RAM. Even then, even with dozens of cores dedicated to the server, planning a single journey takes on the order of minutes. I have tried other types of open source server, such as Navitia and R5, but made no significant progress. Any help on this will be appreciated and all the files needed to let you try something are available.
Similarly, any updates to the conversion software that creates GTFS format public transport timetables for the UK would improve the product, and many others.
Lastly, if you are a UK government body, or similar, and you use this work please consider shraing what you've done. It is inefficient for separate local and regional governments around the UK to be repeating identical work on transport accessibility. By sharing what we're doing and working in the open we can do better than this.
- Open Trip Planner. For all of this project I have used version 1.4.0.
- osmconvert (64-bit version required)(optional). To crop the Open Street Map files to reduce the OTP graph size and speed up journey planning.
- gtsf filter (optional). To crop both the time and geographical extent of the input public transport timetables to reduce the OTP graph size and speed up journey planning.
The tool requires three sources of information,
- OSM maps via GeoFabrik.
- GB public transport timetables (except for rail) via Traveline, converted into GTFS using TransXChange2GTFS.
- GB railway transport timetables via ATOC, converted into GTFS using ATOCCIF2TransXChange.
In addition to OSM maps and GTFS timetables two configuration files are essential to making this work properly,
- build-config.json (this contains only
{platformEntriesLinking: true}. Without this the router fails to link streets with train platforms and most railway stations are unusable. - router-config.json (this must contain as a mininum
routingDefaults: {driveOnRight: false}because in the UK we drive on the left.) Other possible contents are explained in the OTP documentation on configuration options. It is highly likely that tweaking some of these configuation options would speed up route planning significantly. Please let me know if you achieve that.
I haven't yet got this to work, but there seem to be good tutorials about how to run a Grizzly Server on Azure, and I just need to follow them.
The ONS propeR work assisted us enormously in this project. We have in many ways simply extended their approach for Wales to the whole of Great Britain. We were unable to get their recommended GB railway timetable conversion tool to work and so have written our own. Without Marcus Young's work documenting Open Trip Planner and writing excellent tutorials this work would have been impossible.
The following organisations, and many more who I haven't yet written down, have assisted with this work by funding ODILeeds, or by funding projects done by ODILeeds and allowing the outputs to be relased openly, or by improving software that this project relies on,
- ODILeeds and its sponsors (especially those explicitly named below).
- Transport for The West Midlands.
- The Greater Manchester Combined Authority.
- Sheffield City Region.
- Transport for the North.
- West Yorkshire Combined Authority.
- Leeds City Council.
- Bradford Metropoligtan District Council.
- Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council.
- The Data Science Campus of The Office for National Statistics.
More details on their involvement will come when I get time.