The organizing team of the Devroom welcomes you to the Railways and Open Transport room. Exciting content lies ahead.
The public transport sector is mostly a traditional sector with an oligopolistic market situation for system solutions for travel planning and ticketing. The lock-in and dependency to few system vendors in Europe stifles innovation and impedes initiatives to make public transport more attractive. But in the Nordic countries, public transport agencies (PTA) choose an alternative path to overcome system vendor dependency through open source and by engaging in community development. Our qualitative study interviewed 13 persons from 5 different PTAs in the Nordics entails an alternative pathway where they digitally disrupted the regional or national public transport market. They choose to utilise open source for central components and engage in community development to achieve political ambitions to make public transportation an attractive alternative to car travelling.
Our study presents a model on how organisations can co-evolve with the open source community through long-term engagement to access state-of-the-art digital technology and foster innovation. The model depicts a cumulative process that yields better opportunities the longer and deeper the engagement becomes. This enables digital transformation outcomes such as access to a global pool of knowledge, agile and adaptive value-creation, open innovations processes, partnership and synergy opportunities. The talk will present the findings from the study and how the model can be used as a tool to better understand and depicts the organisational alignment process, the inner mechanism and the possible transformative outcome of engaging in open source community development. Our findings demonstrate that also large traditional organisation within the transport sector can partially foster digital transformation capabilities through departmental engagement in community development which can radiate to other parts of the organisation. This entails alternative pathways for traditional organisation that are under demand to digitally transform. But this requires sustained resource investment and loyalty to community objectives to gain influence and trust, to access deeper collaboration and innovation opportunities. The talk will discuss both obstacles, possibilities and strategies that organisations can adopt when engaging in open source community development.
2025 marks a turning point for European mobility data. A significant update to the Multimodal Travel Information Services (MMTIS) regulation takes effect in March 2025. In parallel, ERA and DG MOVE have initiated a coordinated overhaul of all Transmodel-based standards, and a newly agreed TSI Telematics revision (November 2025) sets the direction for railway digitalisation from 2026 onward.
This talk brings together Yann Seimandi (DG MOVE) and Stefan Jugelt (ERA) to give developers and open-source contributors a clear picture of the new regulatory and technical landscape. We will cover:
What’s new in MMTIS 2.0 - How NAPCORE supports harmonised, cross-border mobility data - Upgrading Transmodel-based standards to European Norms - Specification of EUDIT, the new Transmodel-based Booking API - Development of EFIP, a unified European NeTEx Fares Profile - Alignment of TSI Telematics with the broader multimodal ecosystem
Participants will gain insight into the impact on APIs and data models and how open-source communities can contribute to Europe’s mobility infrastructure.
European transport systems are adopting standards such as DATEX II, NeTEx and SIRI, but developers struggle to discover existing tools, validators, converters, and libraries. We're launching Awesome NAPCORE Tools (awesome.napcore.eu) - a community-curated registry of open source tools for European mobility data. This talk introduces the platform and invites the open source community to contribute. We'll cover:
Whether you maintain a DATEX II validator, a NeTEx library, or build transport applications, we want to showcase your work and connect you with users and fellow developers.
We deserve open-source transit technology that is both beautifully designed and easy to use. The Mobility Database is a free, open-source platform for global transit data in the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS) formats. These global specifications make it easier for public transport agencies, operators, and shared mobility providers (bike-share, scooter-share, car-share) to publish accurate, high-quality transit data, enabling them to share their services efficiently with the public.
Why are we building this at MobilityData? 1️⃣ Easy access & maximum reuse of open data: Because open data should not feel like a scavenger hunt, we make it easy to find and access global mobility data for free, and with a barrier-free API.
2️⃣ High quality of open data: We provide simple quality evaluation reports that can guide precious resources of the industry where they matter most, guaranteeing that hard work translates into the high-quality, reliable information public transport riders deserve.
3️⃣ Strengthen the open data community by boosting the international visibility of feeds. This turns the platform into the trusted meeting ground where analysts can easily cross-reference global best practices and collaborate worldwide.
We recently released map visualizations, the ultimate tool for the data detective 🕵: on the platform, we can now instantly see the modes, routes, stops, and coverage of any data source, making it simple to spot a rogue stop or understand a feed's architecture at a glance.
In Europe, the Mobility Database relies on the National Access Points (NAPs) across multiple countries (France, Norway, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and more). And because good open source is a two-way street we also contribute back by providing free open-source tools for our partners and making sure producers coming our way find their way to their local National Access Point (NAP). This way, no stakeholder will have to browse the entire digital continent just to get comprehensive data from their region of choice.
This talk will explore how the Mobility Database fosters a vibrant open-source ecosystem, gives transit data the attention it deserves, and supports sustainable transport.
Despite EU-level initiatives, the availability and quality of open data on public transport differs wildly between member states. I'll talk about the situation in the Czech Republic from the perspective of someone who's been fighting for data availability for the last 5 years.
We'll focus mostly on timetables, briefly covering the history of the Czech Republic's centralised system, the current state of affairs after multiple lawsuits, and the (hopefully) rosy future. I'll also talk about other datasets, like real-time positions and train composition, and also about my experience trying to fit Czech data into existing open standards and software.
In this talk, I will present why and how I started writing Bimba, a public transport application for my city back in 2017. The talk will show major turning points in the journey: when the city started providing open data, when Bimba no longer worked in single place, when Transitous was integrated enabling not only global coverage but also global routing, and meeting people and ideas during last year's RaOT track at FOSDEM and the first Open Transport unconference. I will also present how—with crowdsourcing—Bimba is now also a part of the community and finally, I will hint to what may come in the future.
Not every public transport agency publishes real-time delay information, and some do not even have it. Some of the proprietary transit apps have used user-submitted data to bridge this gap for some time now.
This talk explores how we can do the same in open-source apps, based on Transitous. It covers the steps from collecting the vehicle positions from people's phones in an ethical way, to deriving the delay and to integrating the results with existing routing services and apps.
In addition to allowing for the independent collection of real-time information, the components written for this project (gps-collector and gtfs-delay-tracker) could potentially be useful for community buses, heritage railways and smaller public transport agencies with limited budgets.
In late 2025, DB InfraGO - Germany's state owned operator of railway infrastructure - released its “OpenStation“ API, the new single source of truth for train station data. The API (or as some users have put it: "glorified collection of XML files") is based on the european NeTEx and SIRI standards, and its contents are released as CC0 (public domain), a first for Deutsche Bahn.
In this talk, we want to share our experiences with NeTEx and SIRI from a data producer's perspective, highlight some benefits and challenges of our new API, explain its intended role within the transport data ecosystem, and discuss our future plans for OpenStation. Last but not least, we would like to hear your thoughts and feedback on our new API.
OpenTripPlanner is a mature, open-source engine for multimodal journey planning across public transport, walking, cycling, micromobility, and driving/park and ride.
It supports datasources on multiple different format (NeTEx, GTFS), consumes hundreds of realtime updates per second to timetable data while delivering fast response times.
With all these capabilities it is important to map real world as accurate as possible.
How do you manage time-traveling trains, ghost buses, levitating trains, and how long is a staircase?
Inconsistent data, outliers and quirky rules go head to head with configuration and algorithms in a battle to answer the questions, what is the best journey from A to B.
With a smartphone, users nowadays can plan public transport journeys spontaneously and react to incidents in real-time by changing itineraries on the fly, even proactively. Algorithms and UIs however are still clinging to the notion of an upfront query and journey plan that the user is blindly following as long as is physically possible.
Similar to turn-by-turn directions for car drivers, we propose to focus on showing the user only the next best step they should take according to the real-time situation in order to eventually get to their destination, and not an entire, fixed journey plan. Instead of just the destination arrival time, we compute the probability distribution of destination arrival of the user, taking into account reliability of transfers and alternative continuations. Simulations show that on average, a user will arrive earlier than when following a classical journey planner, not only in the case of delays.
A prototype can be used at https://tespace.traines.eu/ with source code available at https://github.com/traines-source/time-space-train-planner. TeSpace relies on https://transitous.org/ and the https://github.com/motis-project/motis API for global public transport timetable coverage (where available). Let's also talk about how to advance these two beyond classical pareto-optimal journeys!
Long ago I wanted to build an app for the local bike sharing system in my city, only to realize open data was not publicly available. Out of frustration, I built a free and open API for others to create applications, visualizations and research using bike sharing data.
Fast forward today and thanks to the community, the CityBikes project supports more than 800 cities all around the world and our API powers bike sharing transportation apps across all platforms.
Even with the introduction of open data standards like GBFS (at this time, approx 60% of our feeds) there's a fair amount of systems that are not accessible outside of their apps. The reality of open data shatters once you look too close into it: cursed APIs, broken feeds and HTML tables.
Our mission is to change that by providing developers, researchers and organizations the tools and resources to bridge this gap.
In this talk, I’ll share the motivations behind the project, what it’s like to maintain it after more than a decade, and dive into the new tools and historical data systems we’re building.
Visualizing origin-destination (OD) mobility data—commuter flows, transit ridership, freight traffic—is essential for transport planning, but datasets can contain millions of flows that overwhelm traditional mapping approaches. In this talk, I'll present open-source tools for preparing and visualizing large-scale OD data interactively in the browser.
I'll introduce flowmap.gl, a WebGL-based flow map layer for deck.gl that renders geographic movements with adaptive clustering and filtering. To handle large datasets, I'll demonstrate sqlrooms-flowmap, a Python tool that uses DuckDB with spatial extensions to prepare OD data for tiled serving:
The prepared data can be visualized using a demo app built with SQLRooms, a browser-based analytics framework powered by DuckDB, where users can query and explore flows using SQL alongside interactive maps.
I'll show a live demo using Switzerland's National Passenger Transport Model (NPVM)—an open dataset of passenger flows across the Swiss transport network—demonstrating the full pipeline from raw data to interactive visualization, all using open-source tools that can run locally without cloud dependencies.
In the past two years the Open Source Railway Designer (OSRD) has been presented at FOSDEM. The integrations shown there sparked our interest in testing OSRD ourselves in a practical context. In initial studies we used OSRD to evaluate capacity effects on highly congested corridors, including a scenario with a speed increase in rail freight transport. These studies show that OSRD provides a solid basis for open, reproducible capacity studies.
However, the next crucial step in the planning process is microscopic operational simulation, which can be used to evaluate the effect of timetables and operating procedures over time and during disrupted operations. This component is not yet part of the OSRD workflow. To address precisely this gap, we have investigated how the agent-based tool SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) can be applied for railway operational issues. SUMO enables a detailed representation of vehicle movements along an infrastructure under a given timetable and allows delays and different operating modes to be modelled.
In a case study on the Frankfurt underground, we used SUMO to analyse various operational concepts. This included simulations in fixed-block and moving-block operation as well as the modelling of a driverless shunting. The results show that SUMO delivers precise insights into the dynamic system behaviour and provides relevant key figures for operational evaluation - while also exposing the framework conditions and limitations of the current approach.
Finally, we discuss the potential of linking OSRD and SUMO: from open infrastructure modelling and timetable mapping to microscopic operational simulation. We would like to outline how a consistent open source workflow for railway and light rail systems could be created and invite the community to develop it further together.
Open Source Railway Designe (OSRD) https://osrd.fr/en/ Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) https://eclipse.dev/sumo/
You're a railway infrastructure manager. A train operator calls up, and would like to fit a new train in the existing schedule. It should leave at 10am, and it's 8am. How do you make sure this new train won't cause any traffic jams?
Three years ago, we made a proof of concept for this complex problem (I've already talked about it in this track). Since then, we've successfully made it production-ready, and we've had users for a year now.
We have faced new challenges, both expected and unexpected. We have made some mistakes and learned from them. We have stories to tell.
After a successful beta run, the HackerTrain to FOSDEM is back! This time we are going distributed.
In this talk we will present:
Through this beta run of the HackerTrain to FOSDEM we hope to uncover also the potential for (massive) group travel to (FOSS) events, as well as the hurdles that we still need to overcome to make affordable, easy, comfortable and engaging cross-border public travel possible.