Since the previous report two month ago, Itinerary got support for booking URLs, a newer foundation for its Android packages, and more detailed shared vehicle information.

New Features

Booking URLs

Some public transport services provide booking deep links together with their journey search results. That is, you can directly book the journey you have just searched in Itinerary or KTrip on the provider website, without having to search for the same journey again there. Both apps provide that option when available now.

Screenshot of Itinerary showing a result of a train connection search with a booking action.
Booking link on a train journey.

Infrastructure Work

GBFS v3 support

The handling of shared vehicles in KPublicTransport recevied a rework to properly support the much more detailed modelling of vehicle types in newer GBFS versions. Since the early versions of GBFS this has evolved from a simple enum to a complex type describing all kinds of properties of the available vehicles.

As practically all systems supporting rental vehicles for first/last mile routing (OpenTripPlanner, MOTIS, etc) are based on the GBFS datamodel, being limited to an oversimplified set of fixed types was increasingly getting into the way and prevented using newer features of those backends.

Qt 6.11 upgrade for Android

There has been a long overdue update of the Qt version used for KDE’s Android apps. As noted previously this unfortunately means losing support for Android versions 8 and below. ARM32 builds have been discontinued in the process as well, assuming that devices capable of running Android 9 or higher would also be able to run ARM64 code.

There have also been various other fixes related to the Android platform integration:

  • Notification interaction works properly again.
  • Notification icons are now handled more in line of what Android does.
  • Several issues related to safe area margins (ie. rounded screen corners and display cutouts) in Kirigami haven been fixed.

All of this also benefits all of KDE’s Android apps.

IATA SSIM flight schedules

Air France/KLM published their current flight schedule as open data, in IATA SSIM format. A newly built tool allows to convert that into a GTFS feed that Transitous can then consume, using Wikidata to provide translated airport and airline information.

Flight data isn’t new in Transitous, but this dataset is particularly interesting given its size. It’s not limited to Air France/KLM themselves, but also includes all (?) flights from their partner airlines. In total it’s nearly 400.000 flight patterns to almost 1.000 different airports. That essentially connects all currently disconnected public transport “islands” we have in Transitous.

Screenshot of MOTIS' stop view with flight options from Berlin to Bengaluru displayed.
Flight from BER to BLR.

The good news is that it’s holding up to that without a loss in performance, and door-to-door routing from e.g. Berlin to Tokyo actually works.

However, there’s a couple of reasons this isn’t rolled out yet and only available on the test instance:

  • As with the already existing flight data, connectivity between flights and ground transportation is tricky. I’ve written about this years ago already, applying the same approach helps here as well. Additionally, we get terminal information in the SSIM data in some cases, which further improves this, especially at very large airports.
  • We have no way yet to model check-in times in MOTIS, resulting in unrealistic transfer times from ground transportation to flights. It’s on the roadmap there, and also needed for services like Eurostar, or to model security checks at e.g. the Barcelona Sants station.
  • As a side-effect of that the router also finds clever tricks to bypass minimum transfer times between flights.
  • Inter-terminal transfers don’t seem to work reliably, probably because OSM routing doesn’t yield viable connections there. Unlike for railway stations in many countries, airport internals are unfortunately rarely mapped in detail in OSM yet.

For more details see also the discussion in PR 2090.

Events

Registration for this year’s Open Transport Community Conference in October in Bern, Switzerland, opened a few days ago. That’s as close as it gets to an Itinerary conference. If you are interested in attending better sign up quickly, many tickets were already gone after the first day.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

  • Added or improved travel document extractors for Condor and monbus.es.

This has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

  • Improved parsing of trip and route names in OpenTripPlanner responses (bug 519906).
  • Adapted to Deutsche Bahn journey query API changes, fixing missing departure and arrival times there.
  • Added support for wheelchair accessibility information from MOTIS.
  • Added support for querying free-floating rental vehicles from Entur.
  • Removed accidental apostrophe in front of flags in the country selector.

All of this also directly benefits KTrip.

Itinerary app

  • Fixed Itinerary showing an empty page when opening a file with it on a fresh installation.
  • Fixed barcode scan mode on Android.
  • Added support for Matrix SSO login.
  • Fixed arrival platform display in journey search results.
  • Show calendar icons/colors when available.
  • Don’t load all reservation data when initializing the grouped statistics model. This improved performance of the first access to the My Data page.
  • Be slightly more clever when to clear seat reservation from alternatives.

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.