5 ms·

Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

201 points by anewhnaccount3 2y ago

denysvitali 2y ago
Does this mean that the routing will happen on the app? This might be a bit resource intensive, but great feature (especially since it will work offline!)
- maelito 2y ago
  I believe the answer should be on this big issue https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331
- alsodumb 2y ago
  I don't think routing is that resource intensive, especially in transit setting where there are set number of stops (nodes) and the graph is fairly static - we can do tons of preprocessing and then routing queries would have minimal computational overhead.
  - maelito 2y ago
    It is. Especially to do multimodal routing offline. https://github.com/motis-project/motis/issues/423 https://github.com/motis-project/motis/issues/423
    - alsodumb 2y ago
      Thanks for sharing the link! Multimodal routing definitely changes the game, Imma go through the issue.
  - denysvitali 2y ago
    I did implement an A* routing "offline" routing algorithm based on GTFS data + walking paths (OptiTravel) and built a GTFS server (to easily serve the data, do geospatial queries, ...) a few years ago. Granted that this was a university project, for some cities the calculation was rather intensive (e.g: London). I might be wrong though. [1]: https://github.com/denysvitali/optitravel https://github.com/denysvitali/optitravel [2]: https://github.com/denysvitali/gtfs-server https://github.com/denysvitali/gtfs-server
    - dikkechill 2y ago
      Cool projects! I actually had a look at you gtfs-server, to use Rust for processing GTFS files. Processing GTFS (basically large zipped text files) is quite resource intensive indeed, especially if you want to do it for the whole planet. What would you do differently now?
- odo1242 2y ago
  It is definitely resource intensive, but not as much as you would expect. Especially considering the fact that the route only gets calculated once and most modern phones are pretty fast, it won’t really drain your battery.
  - odo1242 2y ago
    Context: just benchmarked it with across-the-US routes and it seems fine
    - maelito 2y ago
      As long as you just simulate transit, without the complexity of walking, cycling, driving to the station.
maelito 2y ago
The document doesn't say which routing engine is used. I'm currently integrating Motis on a similar initiative (a french open source Web map, https://cartes.app https://cartes.app). More is needed to provide a full transit map experience, but Motis does the essential part. We're not far from transit calculation as an open source commodity in countries that publish their transit data as GTFS. E.g. in France there is a whole team called transport.data.gouv.fr that deploys a website + API and do the necessary to convince and help local transport agencies to respect the law. Ingesting this whole dataset is not trivial, lots of bugs arise (e.g. Flixbus's agency id : 0 or conflicting calendar_dates.txt ids between different datasets) but a barebone version goes live in 4 seconds (per big agency) of parsing by Motis's Nigiri module. The developer of Motis is quite involved, and came to Organic Maps's discussion here https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331#issuecomment-2026893849 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331#issue... Then comes the hardest part IMHO : the UI. Motis provides intermodal routing with the choice of walk / reduced mobility / bicycle / car / car + parking before and after the bus, and all this needs to be integrated in a UI that can rival Google / Apple Maps / Transitapp.com / etc Organic Maps have very beautiful transit lines representation in the style of Transit app's great work. https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties... Would be cool if some demo of the extended transit lines could be provided by Organic Maps following this readme file.
- notpushkin 2y ago
  > Organic Maps have very beautiful transit lines representation in the style of Transit app's great work. I've just opened up Chicago in Organic Maps and it isn't anything like Transit app: https://u.ale.sh/omaps-chicago-loop.jpg https://u.ale.sh/omaps-chicago-loop.jpg It works great for simpler transit systems, but certainly there’s some room for improvement!
  - maelito 2y ago
    Not sure about your harsh comparison. Organic's version is less of a rectangle, but is very lisible as well.
myself248 2y ago
Related, shouldn't it be possible to get data from rail signalling radios, and infer when a train is blocking a level crossing, and mark a temporary closure on that road so traffic is routed around it? In the US at least, trains sometimes block crossings for upwards of 10 minutes, and it can be very worthwhile to drive around. Doubly so if you could know en-route and seamlessly reroute, rather than having to approach the crossing to discover the closure.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  Nearly all level crossings are required to, at the very least, trigger a signal with audible sounds and possibly gates, so you just need that same switch to update some online status.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Many crossings in th US actually do not have any warning lights or gates, the only warning of an approaching train is the horn from the locomotive. Low-traffic (either in terms of cars or trains) crossings are often unsignaled.
carom 2y ago
While I don't use Organic Maps as my daily driver because there is no traffic data, it has been invaluable to have on my phone. It is one of the best offline and trail maps I've used.
- therealdrag0 2y ago
  Agreed. I can’t believe how it’s better than any other hiking app (particularly free ones but I tried some non free ones too), but it is. For me the winning feature is the UX around dropping a pin and routing to it via trails just works and is very easy, and includes elevation gain etc. Too many hiking apps require you to navigate along fixed trails in their hike database.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    I just tried it, and I feel like OsmAnd has a more detailed preview of the hiking route: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roMNNJPHDvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roMNNJPHDvc , unless I'm missing something in Organic Maps..
- dikkechill 2y ago
  That's a much requested feature. With imho two main challenges: 1. Much traffic data is private / requires licensing, however some countries have reasonable public data. For example the TraffXML (https://gitlab.com/traffxml https://gitlab.com/traffxml) project has some. 2. The project is free to use, but also volunteer driven. It requires setting up a privacy preserving "live data" infrastructure. If you think this is a nice challenge and you can help, feel free to reach out! https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/1160 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/1160 would be a good starting point.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    There used to also be the interesting prospect of OpenTraffic: https://github.com/opentraffic https://github.com/opentraffic . Unfortunately the main website appears to be down and the GitHub hasn't seen recent contributions, so I'm guessing the project is dead in the water :(
sebastiennight 2y ago
This looks incredibly promising. Having only subway options (and not all of them) in the cities I've been traveling is was a good start, but just adding buses would be a tremendous increase in quality of life... no more going through all the buggy and slow local transit websites. (Why do local transit authorities think it makes sense to front-load several MB of media files on the homepage of their route-finding website, and load the "itinerary" component last? This is beyond me)
mFixman 2y ago
Does anybody know if there's an Organic Maps equivalent for cycling? OSM has a lot of data that's only available in everything-maps like OsmAnd, such as location of bicycle parking spaces or quality of cycle lanes. It would be nice to have it in a nicer interface than that app. I'm currently building a bike + public transit directions engine (bringing your bike on the train). I'm surprised that this doesn't exist yet; it's my favourite way to get around!
- bmicraft 2y ago
  Organic Maps does include bicycle parking POIs. Also some local transit apps do have bike+train routing options for bike carriage and bike sharing: https://anachb.vor.at/ https://anachb.vor.at/ I agree though that something like this is missing in the offline-first maps space.
  - AlexTrask 2y ago
    It also includes an elevation layer that can be useful while biking
- maelito 2y ago
  > I'm currently building a bike + public transit directions engine (bringing your bike on the train). I'm surprised that this doesn't exist yet; it's my favourite way to get around! Care to share a link ? What does it provide compared to Motis's multimodal capabilities ?
AlexTrask 2y ago
From my experience working with GTFS it's difficult because the operators usually don't include all the information but the fact of having GTFS support it's a great step
ks2048 2y ago
Off-topic to the public transit news, but: I've enjoyed Organic Maps for years, but it seems they made a change within the past year (maybe 3-4 months ago) that slowed everything down. Anyone know what happened? It used to be very responsive, but now one a new area, it can take second or two to update.
- amatecha 2y ago
  I've noticed this as well. I often have to zoom in or out or move the view around to get the map to actually "draw", otherwise there are giant empty regions of the map (sometimes the entire visible map).

Does this mean that the routing will happen on the app? This might be a bit resource intensive, but great feature (especially since it will work offline!)

maelito 2y ago
I believe the answer should be on this big issue https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331
alsodumb 2y ago
I don't think routing is that resource intensive, especially in transit setting where there are set number of stops (nodes) and the graph is fairly static - we can do tons of preprocessing and then routing queries would have minimal computational overhead.
- maelito 2y ago
  It is. Especially to do multimodal routing offline. https://github.com/motis-project/motis/issues/423 https://github.com/motis-project/motis/issues/423
  - alsodumb 2y ago
    Thanks for sharing the link! Multimodal routing definitely changes the game, Imma go through the issue.
- denysvitali 2y ago
  I did implement an A* routing "offline" routing algorithm based on GTFS data + walking paths (OptiTravel) and built a GTFS server (to easily serve the data, do geospatial queries, ...) a few years ago. Granted that this was a university project, for some cities the calculation was rather intensive (e.g: London). I might be wrong though. [1]: https://github.com/denysvitali/optitravel https://github.com/denysvitali/optitravel [2]: https://github.com/denysvitali/gtfs-server https://github.com/denysvitali/gtfs-server
  - dikkechill 2y ago
    Cool projects! I actually had a look at you gtfs-server, to use Rust for processing GTFS files. Processing GTFS (basically large zipped text files) is quite resource intensive indeed, especially if you want to do it for the whole planet. What would you do differently now?
odo1242 2y ago
It is definitely resource intensive, but not as much as you would expect. Especially considering the fact that the route only gets calculated once and most modern phones are pretty fast, it won’t really drain your battery.
- odo1242 2y ago
  Context: just benchmarked it with across-the-US routes and it seems fine
  - maelito 2y ago
    As long as you just simulate transit, without the complexity of walking, cycling, driving to the station.

maelito 2y ago

The document doesn't say which routing engine is used. I'm currently integrating Motis on a similar initiative (a french open source Web map, https://cartes.app https://cartes.app). More is needed to provide a full transit map experience, but Motis does the essential part. We're not far from transit calculation as an open source commodity in countries that publish their transit data as GTFS. E.g. in France there is a whole team called transport.data.gouv.fr that deploys a website + API and do the necessary to convince and help local transport agencies to respect the law. Ingesting this whole dataset is not trivial, lots of bugs arise (e.g. Flixbus's agency id : 0 or conflicting calendar_dates.txt ids between different datasets) but a barebone version goes live in 4 seconds (per big agency) of parsing by Motis's Nigiri module. The developer of Motis is quite involved, and came to Organic Maps's discussion here https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331#issuecomment-2026893849 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/5331#issue... Then comes the hardest part IMHO : the UI. Motis provides intermodal routing with the choice of walk / reduced mobility / bicycle / car / car + parking before and after the bus, and all this needs to be integrated in a UI that can rival Google / Apple Maps / Transitapp.com / etc Organic Maps have very beautiful transit lines representation in the style of Transit app's great work. https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties... Would be cool if some demo of the extended transit lines could be provided by Organic Maps following this readme file.

notpushkin 2y ago
> Organic Maps have very beautiful transit lines representation in the style of Transit app's great work. I've just opened up Chicago in Organic Maps and it isn't anything like Transit app: https://u.ale.sh/omaps-chicago-loop.jpg https://u.ale.sh/omaps-chicago-loop.jpg It works great for simpler transit systems, but certainly there’s some room for improvement!
- maelito 2y ago
  Not sure about your harsh comparison. Organic's version is less of a rectangle, but is very lisible as well.

myself248 2y ago

Related, shouldn't it be possible to get data from rail signalling radios, and infer when a train is blocking a level crossing, and mark a temporary closure on that road so traffic is routed around it? In the US at least, trains sometimes block crossings for upwards of 10 minutes, and it can be very worthwhile to drive around. Doubly so if you could know en-route and seamlessly reroute, rather than having to approach the crossing to discover the closure.

bobthepanda 2y ago
Nearly all level crossings are required to, at the very least, trigger a signal with audible sounds and possibly gates, so you just need that same switch to update some online status.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Many crossings in th US actually do not have any warning lights or gates, the only warning of an approaching train is the horn from the locomotive. Low-traffic (either in terms of cars or trains) crossings are often unsignaled.

carom 2y ago

While I don't use Organic Maps as my daily driver because there is no traffic data, it has been invaluable to have on my phone. It is one of the best offline and trail maps I've used.

therealdrag0 2y ago
Agreed. I can’t believe how it’s better than any other hiking app (particularly free ones but I tried some non free ones too), but it is. For me the winning feature is the UX around dropping a pin and routing to it via trails just works and is very easy, and includes elevation gain etc. Too many hiking apps require you to navigate along fixed trails in their hike database.
- netsharc 2y ago
  I just tried it, and I feel like OsmAnd has a more detailed preview of the hiking route: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roMNNJPHDvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roMNNJPHDvc , unless I'm missing something in Organic Maps..
dikkechill 2y ago
That's a much requested feature. With imho two main challenges: 1. Much traffic data is private / requires licensing, however some countries have reasonable public data. For example the TraffXML (https://gitlab.com/traffxml https://gitlab.com/traffxml) project has some. 2. The project is free to use, but also volunteer driven. It requires setting up a privacy preserving "live data" infrastructure. If you think this is a nice challenge and you can help, feel free to reach out! https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/1160 https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/1160 would be a good starting point.
- n4r9 2y ago
  There used to also be the interesting prospect of OpenTraffic: https://github.com/opentraffic https://github.com/opentraffic . Unfortunately the main website appears to be down and the GitHub hasn't seen recent contributions, so I'm guessing the project is dead in the water :(

sebastiennight 2y ago

This looks incredibly promising. Having only subway options (and not all of them) in the cities I've been traveling is was a good start, but just adding buses would be a tremendous increase in quality of life... no more going through all the buggy and slow local transit websites. (Why do local transit authorities think it makes sense to front-load several MB of media files on the homepage of their route-finding website, and load the "itinerary" component last? This is beyond me)

mFixman 2y ago

Does anybody know if there's an Organic Maps equivalent for cycling? OSM has a lot of data that's only available in everything-maps like OsmAnd, such as location of bicycle parking spaces or quality of cycle lanes. It would be nice to have it in a nicer interface than that app. I'm currently building a bike + public transit directions engine (bringing your bike on the train). I'm surprised that this doesn't exist yet; it's my favourite way to get around!

bmicraft 2y ago
Organic Maps does include bicycle parking POIs. Also some local transit apps do have bike+train routing options for bike carriage and bike sharing: https://anachb.vor.at/ https://anachb.vor.at/ I agree though that something like this is missing in the offline-first maps space.
- AlexTrask 2y ago
  It also includes an elevation layer that can be useful while biking
maelito 2y ago
> I'm currently building a bike + public transit directions engine (bringing your bike on the train). I'm surprised that this doesn't exist yet; it's my favourite way to get around! Care to share a link ? What does it provide compared to Motis's multimodal capabilities ?

AlexTrask 2y ago

From my experience working with GTFS it's difficult because the operators usually don't include all the information but the fact of having GTFS support it's a great step

ks2048 2y ago

Off-topic to the public transit news, but: I've enjoyed Organic Maps for years, but it seems they made a change within the past year (maybe 3-4 months ago) that slowed everything down. Anyone know what happened? It used to be very responsive, but now one a new area, it can take second or two to update.

amatecha 2y ago
I've noticed this as well. I often have to zoom in or out or move the view around to get the map to actually "draw", otherwise there are giant empty regions of the map (sometimes the entire visible map).