Open-source software projects like OneBusAway, OpenTripPlanner, and TheTransitClock provide real-time transit information and trip planning for public transportation agencies. They have been deployed in over a dozen cities worldwide and are governed through open-source foundations to encourage collaboration and long-term support. Transitioning to these open-source solutions can help agencies avoid rising costs of proprietary software and reduce risks of vendor lock-in.

1. Open Source Software in
Public Transportation
A Case Study
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Sean J. Barbeau, Ph.D.
Center for Urban Transportation Research
University of South Florida

2. What is open source software?
• Source code that is publicly available and can be viewed, copied,
modified, or enhanced by anyone
• OSS dependence is increasing trend in general software industry
Chromium
Microsoft Edge

3. At least 3 major real-time transit info OSS projects
OpenTripPlanner TheTransitClock
(formerly transiTime)
OneBusAway
onebusaway.org opentripplanner.org thetransitclock.org

4. Each do different things
 TheTransitClock
 Focuses on generating arrival/departure predictions given raw vehicle data
 Can export predictions in GTFS-realtime and other formats
 OneBusAway (OBA)
 Provides an API optimized for accessing real-time transit information
 Includes open-source native apps for iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, Google
Glass
 Can consume GTFS-realtime and other real-time formats
 OpenTripPlanner (OTP)
 Provides an API optimized for multimodal trip planning, including bikeshare
 Can consume GTFS-realtime, General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS)

5. 2016 FTA Mobility On Demand Sandbox OTP projects
Added bike/scooter-share &
ride-hailing to OpenTripPlanner
Added flex routing to OpenTripPlanner
trimet.org/newplanner
plan.govermont.org

6. Pelias – Open-source geocoder
 TriMet’s project included
transit-related improvements
to Pelias, an open-source
geocoder
 Mapzen, developer of Pelias,
shut down in Jan 2018
 TriMet MOD Sandbox project
was able to continue work on
Pelias
 Good example of OSS
mitigating risk of innovation

7. Case study of OpenTripPlanner and OneBusAway
 Funded via Federal Transit Administration Mobility on
Demand Sandbox project with TriMet
 PIs Sean Barbeau, Ph.D. and Steven Polzin, Ph.D.
 Interviewed over a dozen public and private sector
stakeholders involved in the development, governance,
and deployment of transit OSS
 Reviewed Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA)
Mobility on Demand (MOD) Sandbox projects with
TriMet and Vtrans
 Including use of Pelias open-source geocoder
 Examined OpenTripPlanner and OneBusAway as case
studies
 Investigated primary perceived risks of OSS - lack of
support for software, lack of turn-key solutions, project
fragmentation
https://trimet.org/mod/

8. Typical architecture
TheTransitClock
OneBusAway
Raw
vehicle
data GTFS-realtime
OpenTripPlanner
Trip planning API
Real-time
arrival API
Bikeshare API
Native apps
(e.g.,
OneBusAway
Android)

9. Modular
OneBusAway
Existing feed
from agency
OpenTripPlanner
Trip planning API
Real-time
arrival API
Bikeshare API
GTFS-realtime

10. A lot of users and deployments
 OneBusAway
 Deployed in 10 cities worldwide
 For iOS and Android alone (not including web, SMS, IVR, Alexa):
 Over 1 million unique users
 ~330k active users in the last 30 days
 Hundreds of thousands more when including web and white-label deployments
 Managed by Open Transit Software Foundation 501(c)(3)
 OpenTripPlanner
 Over 15 production deployments worldwide
 NYDOT state-wide deployment
 Norway, Finland, Netherlands country-wide deployments
 Managed via the Software Freedom Conservancy
 TheTransitClock
 Production deployments in eight cities, including in Florida, Washington D.C., Chile and Poland

11. OTSF (OneBusAway) Project Members
 Universities
 Georgia Tech (Kari Watkins)
 Kyoto University (Jan-Dirk Schmöcker)
 Edinburgh Napier University (Achille Fonzone)
 University of South Florida (Sean Barbeau)
 University of Tennessee Knoxville (Candace Brakewood)
 University of Washington (Alan Borning)
 Transit Agencies
 Hillsborough Area Regional Transit, Tampa, Florida
 King County Metro, King County, Washington (Alex Rampley)
 Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York City (Will Wong and Visar Ramku)
 San Diego Metropolitan Transit System, San Diego, California (Devin Braun)
 Sound Transit, Puget Sound Region, Washington (Chris Karnes)
 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Washington DC (Stephanie Lynn Jones)
 York Region Transit, Ontario, Canada (Valerian Eftime and Rajeev Roy)
 Companies and Non-profits
 Cambridge Systematics (Sheldon Brown)
 goEuropa (Wojciech Kulesza)
 TransitScreen (Matt Caywood)
 Trillium Transit (Thomas Craig)
 Individual Developers
 Aaron Brethorst
 Sean Óg Crudden
 Kurt Raschke
https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org/overview/members

12. Statewide deployments
NY DOT (New York State)
Other agencies
Arlington, VA Commute Planning Site
Piemonte Region, Italy and the City of Torino
Municipal Transport Company of Valencia (Valencia, Spain)
SMTC, Grenoble Alpes métropole, l'État Français, the Rhône-alpes region,
the Isère council and the City of Grenoble (France)
STAR network (Rennes, France)
Urban Transport Authority of Poznań (Poznań, Poland)
Universities
University of South Florida
Trento Province, Italy SmartCampus Project
OpenTripPlanner deployments
 Transit Agencies
 TriMet (Portland, OR)
 Hillsborough Area Regional Transit (Tampa,
FL)
 Metropolitan Transportation Authority (NY,
NY)
 Sound Transit (Seattle, WA)
 MARTA (Atlanta, GA)
 Metro (Los Angeles, CA)
 MBTA (Boston, MA)
 Nationwide deployments
 Finland
 Norway
 Netherlands
http://docs.opentripplanner.org/en/latest/Deployments/

13. Conclusions & Recommendations
• De facto open data standards (GTFS/GTFS-realtime) have accelerated transit OSS deployments
• OSS can help avoid increasing licensing costs of proprietary subscription solutions (but requires
expertise to deploy)
• OSS can help avoid vendor lock-in
• OSS may be more responsive and flexible to needs
• OSS supports increased cost sharing & collaboration opportunities among transit agencies
• Need to update procurement requirements and practices
• Various OSS licensing options exist (e.g., GPL vs. Apache v2)
• Similar security concerns for proprietary and OSS
• OSS risks can be effectively managed via governance structures, collaboration, and agile development
strategies
• Resources are needed to coordinate OSS projects
 Peer-to-peer communication on all the above topics is highly encouraged

14. Published results of study
 TriMet FTA MOD Sandbox final report
 Not yet released by FTA
 TRB 2019 paper:
 “Open Source Software in Public
Transportation: A Case Study” by Sean J.
Barbeau and Steven Polzin
 http://bit.ly/trb-open-transit-software

15. Acknowledgements
 This paper is output of collaboration between the IBI Group, TriMet, the
Federal Transit Administration, and the authors as part of the Federal Transit
Administration’s Mobility on Demand (MOD) Sandbox program.
 The opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this presentation are those
of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the U.S. Department of
Transportation.
 Thanks to Bibiana McHugh from TriMet for serving as the Project Manager and
to the individuals and organizations who were interviewed for this paper.
 Dr. Sean Barbeau serves on the Board of Directors for the Open Transit
Software Foundation and on the OpenTripPlanner Project Leadership
Committee, which are unpaid, volunteer positions.

16. Thanks!
@sjbarbeau
linkedin.com/in/seanbarbeau
Sean J. Barbeau, Ph.D.
barbeau@usf.edu
813.974.7208

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19. Open-source is awesome
 Allows multiple agencies to leverage the same resources
 Don’t start from scratch – jump start new projects
 Don’t reinvent the wheel – spend those resources elsewhere
 Reduces risk of vendor lock-in
 Any vendor can deploy and support an open-source solution
 If a vendor doesn’t perform, agency can switch vendors and keep
software
 Reduces long-term risk of innovation failure
 Someone else can also improve upon past efforts

20. Transit OSS enables research
 Real-time information (RTI) has many benefits
 Shorter perceived wait time [1][8]
 Shorter actual wait time[1]
 Increased feeling of safety (e.g., at night) [5][6]
 Improved perception of agency[8]
 Increased ridership[7]
 Quality of real-time info is important
 In one study, 9% of riders said they took the bus
less often due to errors in RTI[9]
[1] Kari Edison Watkins, Brian Ferris, Alan Borning, G. Scott Rutherford, and David Layton (2011), "Where Is My Bus? Impact of mobile real-time information on the perceived and actual wait time of transit riders," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Vol. 45 pp. 839-848.
[4] Aaron Steinfeld and John Zimmerman, "Interviews with transit riders in San Francisco and Seattle," ed, 2010.
[5] Brian Ferris, Kari Watkins, and Alan Borning (2010), "OneBusAway: results from providing real-time arrival information for public transit," in Proceedings of the 28th International CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, pp. 1807-1816.
[6] A. Gooze, K. Watkins, and A. Borning (2013), "Benefits of Real-Time Information and the Impacts of Data Accuracy on the Rider Experience," in Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., January 13, 2013.
[7] Brakewood, Macfarlane and Watkins (2015). The Impact of Real-Time Information on Bus Ridership in New York City. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Volume 53, pp. 59-7
[8] Brakewood, Barbeau, and Watkins (2014). An experiment evaluating the impacts of real-time transit information on bus riders in Tampa, Florida,, Transportation Research Part A, Volume 69, pp. 409-422.
[9] A. Gooze, K. Watkins, and A. Borning (2013), “Benefits of Real-Time Information and the Impacts of Data Accuracy on the Rider Experience,” in Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., January 13, 2013.
Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger

21. OneBusAway Governance - Overview
 Modeled after Apache Foundation
 12 seats for Board of Directors, elected every year by members
 3 Transit agencies
 3 Universities doing OneBusAway research
 3 Private sector/non-profit
 3 Individual developers
 At least 1 year of sustained contributions required
 New members are voted in by majority of current members
 Technical decisions made by authorized developer maintaining project (but final authority
rests with board)
 Annual meeting at TRB
 Charter can be amended by 2/3 majority votes of Board and members
 Code licensed under Apache v2.0
https://onebusaway.org/the-onebusaway-project/governance/

22. OneBusAway Governance
 Managed by the Open Transit Software Foundation
 501(c)(3) – non-profit
 Some transit agencies provide “voluntary licensing fee” to provide
funding for OTSF
https://onebusaway.org/the-onebusaway-project/governance/

23. OpenTripPlanner Governance
 Under the Software Freedom Conservancy
(https://sfconservancy.org/)
 Project Leadership Committee (PLC) handles
management
 Quarterly conference calls
 Roadmap of future features
 v1.x, v2.0 release plan
 Code licensed under L-GPL license
http://docs.opentripplanner.org/en/latest/Governance/

24. Steps for getting started
 Open transit data
 General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data
 GTFS-realtime (optional)
 If you want to run it yourself:
 OneBusAway - https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-application-
modules#getting-started
 OTP - http://docs.opentripplanner.org/en/latest/Basic-Tutorial/
 TransitClock - https://github.com/TheTransitClock/transitclockDocker
 If you’d like help:
 OneBusAway - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/onebusaway-developers
 OpenTripPlanner - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/opentripplanner-
users
 TransitClock - https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/thetransitclock

25. OneBusAway - Open-source native apps
Android iPhone
https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-application-modules

26. WMATA Bus (Washington, D.C.)
TheTransitClock
Real-time transit info without proprietary prediction algorithms
OneBusAway

27. MTA (New York, NY)
OpenTripPlanner
OneBusAway
Real-time info and trip planning

28. HART (Tampa, FL)
OpenTripPlanner
OneBusAway
Real-time info, trip planning, and bikeshare
Bikeshare GBFS feed