API

Transitous is provided by a community of volunteers to fulfill the needs of Free and Open Source applications. We provide the service on a best-effort basis and reserve the right to stop providing it to any consumer at any time.

Can I use it?

Go ahead if all of these points apply to your project:

See sections below "API Usage" for details.

Usage Policy

API Usage

1. Publish Your Code: Make sure your source code is published under an appropriate open-source license (light prototype testing before that is fine).
2. Clarify Open Questions: If you think your requests might require significant resources on our side (see Resource Usage), please contact us in our Matrix Channel to make sure we can handle your expected resource usage. We can also help you to pick the most efficient endpoint for your functionality. We will also coordinate breaking changes in that channel. Please refrain from contacting us if your case is already excluded in this policy.
3. Contact Information:

   Make sure you send HTTP User-Agent headers with every request, containing at least the following information:

   • Name of the application
   • Version of the client
   • A way of contact (e-mail address or website URL)

   If it is not possible to send a User-Agent header, because your application runs inside a browser, the Referer header is a sufficient replacement. However, please make sure to add contact information to your website in this case.

4. Attribution: Link to https://transitous.org/sources/ in a visible place. Make sure to adhere to the conditions imposed by these sources. In particular, since Transitous uses OpenStreetMap data, you have to adhere to its attribution guidelines, too.
5. Donate: Consider adding a link to the donation page (or donating yourself).
6. Showcase: You may add your application to the Transitous website. Please note that we will not add vibecoded apps.

Resource Usage

Many requests (> 720 requests / 24h) of type /plan, /one-to-many, /one-to-all, many users and automated requests are the primary source of high resource usage on our side. Please coordinate with us if your use case requires any of this.

There is no need to scrape data using the API, you may download our entire source dataset here.

Commercial Use

Due to data source licences and resource prioritisation, commercial use is not allowed. If you are a charitable organization and not already covered by other rules above, you may contact us to discuss exceptions.

MOTIS 2 API

Transitous provides the MOTIS 2 API. It is the first stable and versioned MOTIS API, and is incompatible with previous development versions of the API.

Our API endpoint is located at https://api.transitous.org/api/.

API endpoints for Transitous' own development, such as the staging instance (staging.api.transitous.org), or internal API endpoints for direct access to servers behind the load balancer (*.motis-project.org, *.motis-project.de, *.spline.de), must not be used by applications.

API Documentation

Client Libraries

Web Widget

You can embed a journey-search widget into your website. You can find more information in the Wiki.

Staging API

MOTIS releases are tested with our data before deploying them to the main API endpoint.

You can test the almost-latest MOTIS release on https://staging.api.transitous.org/api/.

Please note that full planet-wide OpenStreetMap data is not available there. The web interface is currently shared between stable and the staging instance, and does not represent the featureset available in the MOTIS version.