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User FAQ
This a FAQ page for end users using an OpenTripPlanner installation.
A trip planner helps you figure out how best to get where you want to go. A multi-modal trip planner lets you plan routes using multiple "modes," for example, on foot, bike, train, bus, or some combination thereof. A good multi-modal trip planner allows you to easily tailor your trip to your preferences, for example by eliminating transfers, walking a more scenic path, or only riding buses with bike storage.
OpenTripPlanner is an open source multi-modal trip planner. It brings together work from a number of existing open source projects, including Graphserver, OneBusAway, and FivePoints, and aims to be easy-to-use, flexible, reliable, and fast.
OpenTripPlanner is an open source project and is a collaborative effort among many individuals, transit agencies, and non-profit organizations. Developers working on OpenTripPlanner hail from TriMet, OpenPlans, Graphserver, FivePoints, byCycle, and OneBusAway, among others. The working group page has a more complete listing of people who have contributed to the project. The official kickoff for the project was a transit workshop in Portland hosted by TriMet, the regional transportation authority.
At its core, the project is driven by transit enthusiasts.
We want to make transit easy, convenient, and enjoyable, and we think a high-quality trip planner is an important part of achieving that goal.
The most common reason is that your agency does not release Google Transit Feed Specification data.
There are several reasons why OpenTripPlanner can stop planning trips on a transit agency. The most common reason is that their General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) has expired. This is the data that OpenTripPlanner uses to know what the schedules and routes of your local transit agency are. It's also possible that there is a bug in OpenTripPlanner. If you could drop a line to us using the feedback functionality in the app, we'd appreciate it.
OpenTripPlanner's street and map data comes from OpenStreetMap, a wiki-like map of the world that anyone can edit. Anyone can fix problems they see on this map. If you head to the aforementioned website, you can learn how to change this data yourself.
I edited the map data for my area, but it doesn't show up in the app (or it does show up but I can't plan trips on it).
We download transit data and OpenStreetMap data once every two weeks or so and use it to build a graph containing all of the transit and streets in your region. If you've just edited the data, it can take up to two weeks for it to be updated. The background map is generated separately from the map that is used for trip planning, so it may be more up to date than the map the trip plans are using.