Cityliner

Cityliner turns public transport schedules into high-resolution city posters. It reads GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) feeds and draws route segments on a map. Line thickness and opacity show how often vehicles run there.

Use it to see which corridors carry the city, where the network thins out, and how rail, tram, bus, ferry, and cable routes fit together.

Actions

• Generate a poster: bring a GTFS feed and export a high-resolution PDF.
• Open the showcase: see example posters and commercial options.
• Open a city request: include the city, GTFS source, center coordinates, and whether the feed has shapes.txt.
• Commission a print-ready poster: request custom city, region, or transit-network work.
• Add a city config: add a repeatable setup for another city and submit a pull request.

Public Project and Commercial Use

This repository contains the open-source Cityliner engine. It does not include raw GTFS feeds, processed data, print masters, customer files, or commercial workflow.

The code is GPLv3. Gallery images are Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 unless noted otherwise. GTFS feeds, map data, city/agency logos, and transit brand marks can have their own licenses and permissions. For commercial posters, use logo-free layouts unless you have explicit permission to use the relevant marks.

Table of Contents

1. Actions
2. Public Project and Commercial Use
3. Features
4. Installation and Setup
5. Usage
6. Gallery
7. Contribution
8. License
9. Acknowledgements

Features

• Draw GTFS routes by frequency and route type.
• Export a high-resolution PDF.
• Multiple color schemes: default, pastel, inferno, earthy, cool.
• Water body visualization (beta).
• Administrative borders (beta).

Installation and Setup

1. Clone this repository:

   git clone git@github.com:dragoon/cityliner.git
   cd cityliner

2. Install required dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Download the ocean shape file from OpenStreetMap: https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de/data/water-polygons.html (WGS84 projection) and unzip it into the oceans directory.
4. Download GTFS data with shapes.txt. Start with the MobilityData catalog: https://github.com/MobilityData/mobility-database-catalogs. Place the feed under gtfs/[place-name]/**.
5. Add city or transport agency logos only if you have permission to use them, and place them under assets/logos/[place-name]/**.

Usage

Run:

python main.py --gtfs gtfs/[place-name] --center [center_coordinates] --poster [other_options]

Options:

• --gtfs: Path to the GTFS directory. (Required)
• --processed-dir: Path to the directory with intermediate files (defaults to ./processed).
• --center: Coordinates of the center in the format latitude,longitude. (Required)
• --max-dist: Maximum distance from the center on y-axis (in km). Default is 20 km.
• --width: Width of the output drawing (in px).
• --height: Height of the output drawing (in px)
• --poster: Create a drawing for A0 poster size.
• --water: Plot water bodies (beta).
• --admin-borders: Plot administrative borders of the city/region determined by the center coordinates (beta).
• --color-scheme: Choose a color scheme for the poster. Allowed values are: default, pastel, inferno, earthy, cool. Default is default.
• --logos: List of logos for the poster (inside ./assets/logos/{place-name}/)

(Either --width and --height or --poster must be provided)

Example Helsinki:

python main.py --gtfs=./gtfs/helsinki --place-name=helsinki --center=60.1706017,24.9414482 --poster --color-scheme=pastel --water --logos "helsinki.svg" "hsl.svg"

See city configs in https://github.com/dragoon/cityliner/blob/master/citylines/process_configs.py

Gallery

Line weight and opacity show service frequency on each route segment.

Contribution

Forks, issues, and pull requests are welcome. Useful contributions include city configs, setup fixes, color schemes, preview generation, and license notes for public data sources.

For city requests, open an issue with the city name, GTFS source, center coordinates, and whether the feed includes shapes.txt.

License

Gallery

The gallery photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Code

This source code is licensed under GNU GPLv3. See the LICENSE file for more details.

Copyright (c) 2023
Roman Prokofyev <https://prokofyev.ch/>

Acknowledgements

This project is inspired by Michael Mueller's gtfs-visualizations project, implemented with Node.js and Processing, and my fork: https://github.com/dragoon/gtfs-visualizations, which allowed to process large GTFS files, added actual poster-generation code, and a possibility to restrict the visualization area within a certain radius, among other improvements.

This implementation has been developed from scratch with Python, ReportLab for PDF rendering, different color palettes, and a possibility to visualize water bodies using OpenSteetMap data, among other changes.