MOTIS stands for Modular Open Transportation Information System. It is an open-source software platform designed to facilitate efficient planning and routing in multi-modal transportation systems. Developed to handle large-scale transportation data, MOTIS integrates various modes of transport - such as walking, cycling, sharing mobility (e-scooters, bike sharing, car sharing), and public transport - to provide optimized routing solutions.

MOTIS currently supports the following input formats:

• (One) OpenStreetMap osm.pbf file for the street network, addresses, indoor-routing, etc.
• (Multiple) GTFS (including GTFS Flex and GTFS Fares v2) feeds for static timetables
• (Multiple) GTFS-RT feeds for real-time updates (delays, cancellations, track changes, service alerts)
• (Multiple) GBFS feeds for sharing mobility

Working on (funded by NLnet): NeTEx and SIRI

MOTIS provides an easy-to-use REST API (JSON via HTTP) with an OpenAPI specification (source) that allows you to generate clients for your favorite programming language. You may also directly use the pre-generated JS client. Some more available client libraries are listed over at Transitous.

Also checkout Transitous, which operates a MOTIS instance with global coverage (as far as available) at api.transitous.org. Please make sure to read the Usage Policy before integrating this endpoint into your app.

Features

Note

🚀 MOTIS is optimized for high performance with low memory usage.

This enables planet-sized deployments on affordable hardware.

MOTIS is a swiss army knife for mobility and comes with all features you need for a next generation mobility platform:

• routing: one mode walking, bike, car, sharing mobility / combined modes
• geocoding: multi-language address and stop name completion with fuzzy string matching and resolution to geo coordinates
• reverse geocoding: resolving geo coordinates to the closest address
• tile server: background map tiles

MOTIS uses efficient traffic day bitsets that allows efficient loading of full year timetables! Loading one year of timetable doesn’t take much more RAM than loading one month.

Features can be turned on and off as needed.

Quick Start

• Create a folder with the following files.
• Download MOTIS from the latest release and extract the archive.
• Download a OpenStreetMap dataset as osm.pbf (e.g. from Geofabrik) and place it in the folder
• Download one or more GTFS datasets and place them in the folder

./motis config my.osm.pbf gtfs.zip  # generates a minimal config.yml
./motis import                      # preprocesses data
./motis server                      # starts a HTTP server on port 8080

This will preprocess the input files and create a data folder. After that, it will start a server.

Important

Ensure a valid timetable is used. If the timetable is outdated, it will not contain any trips to consider for upcoming dates.

This script will execute the steps described above for a small dataset for the city of Aachen, Germany:

Linux / macOS

# set TARGET to linux-arm64, macos-arm64, ... to fit your setup
# see release list for supported platforms
TARGET="linux-amd64"
wget https://github.com/motis-project/motis/releases/latest/download/motis-${TARGET}.tar.bz2
tar xf motis-${TARGET}.tar.bz2
wget https://github.com/motis-project/test-data/raw/aachen/aachen.osm.pbf
wget https://opendata.avv.de/current_GTFS/AVV_GTFS_Masten_mit_SPNV.zip
./motis config aachen.osm.pbf AVV_GTFS_Masten_mit_SPNV.zip
./motis import
./motis server

Windows

Invoke-WebRequest https://github.com/motis-project/motis/releases/latest/download/motis-windows.zip -OutFile motis-windows.zip
Expand-Archive motis-windows.zip
Invoke-WebRequest https://github.com/motis-project/test-data/archive/refs/heads/aachen.zip -OutFile aachen.zip
Expand-Archive aachen.zip
./motis config aachen.osm.pbf AVV_GTFS_Masten_mit_SPNV.zip
./motis import
./motis server

Documentation

Developer Setup

Build MOTIS from source:

• for Linux
• for Windows
• for macOS

Set up a server using your build:

• for Linux

MOTIS uses pkg for dependency management. See its README for how to work with it.

Configuration

• Advanced Setups