Public transport route planner

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A public transport route planner is a type of journey planner designed to provide information about available public transport journeys, nowadays often made available as a Web application. The application prompts a user to input an origin and a destination, and uses a journey planning engine to find a route between the two using specified services using available Public Transport services. Since unlike a Road route planner its choice of routes is constrained by the available journeys of the public transport services, it is more properly termed a journey planner -- rather than a route planner.

An Intermodal Journey Planner is an advanced form of route planner that supports journeys with legs using different modes of transport, including rapid transit or metro, railways, buses and ferries. Some route planners support door-to-door planning, others only between well-known points on the Transport network such as stations, airports or bus stops. Time of travel may be constrained to either time of departure or arrival and other routing preferences may be specified as well.

[edit] Examples of Public Transport Route Planners

Many transportation authorities include a public transport journey planner on their websites. For example, a municipal government responsible for bus or rail lines would have a transport planner using their services exclusively, or possibly partnering or geographically closely related services. For example, the London Tube Journey Planner offers trip planning that specifically involves the London Tube. Transport for London has a multimodal journey planner covering all modes of transport in London, including cycling.

Other entities, including municipal government, state and federal government, and for profit companies operate web sites offer trip planning services for large metropolitan areas, or even country-wide. For profit companies typically operate sites free to people planning trips, relying on advertising or ticketing for revenues. For example

Deutsche Bahn provides rail trip planning for much of the European rail network, and local bus and metro connections within Germany.
UK National Rail Enquiries [1] provides rail trip planning for the UK.
Transport Direct is a universal transport planner for the United Kingdom; includes many modes such as car, train, bus, metro, ferry, tram, cycling, and walking.

Google Transit based on Google Maps, features journey planning using data provided by a number of transit operators in the United States and elsewhere. The Google Transit Data Feed open source software project is dedicated to providing support to transit operators to transform their transit data to the Google Transit specific data feed format.