Minotor

Documentation and examples

A lightweight and easy to use public transit router primarily targeting client-side usage for research, data visualization, dynamic web and mobile apps.

Unlike most transit planners out there, minotor can store all the transit data for a given day in memory on the client, allowing for fast runtime queries using only local data. This is particularly useful for highly dynamic applications or complex visualizations for research purposes where the user needs to query the data in real-time. Privacy-conscious applications where the user does not want to share their location data with a server can also benefit from this model.

The transit router and the stops index of minotor can run in the browser, on React Native or in a Node.js environment. Transit data (GTFS) parsing runs on Node.js, and the resulting data is serialized as a protobuf binary that can be loaded by the router.

Minotor's routing algorithm is mostly based on RAPTOR. See Round-Based Public Transit Routing, D. Delling et al. 2012.

Examples

In-browser transit router

An example client-side transit router running in the browser with a web worker.

Demo | Code

Isochrone maps

An example implementation of dynamic isochrone maps using minotor in the browser.

Demo | Code

A more complete isochrone map showcase can be found on isochrone.ch.

Features

• GTFS feed parsing (standard and extended)
• Geographic and textual stop search
• Point queries — earliest-arrival journey from an origin to a destination at a given time
• Range queries — all Pareto-optimal journeys within a departure-time window
• Isochrone computation — earliest arrival times / fastest routes to every reachable stop

Tested GTFS feeds

Feed	Parsing time	Timetable size for a day (compressed)
Swiss GTFS feed	~2 minutes	20 MB (5 MB)

Get started

Installation

npm i minotor

TypeScript API

GTFS feed parsing (Node.js only)

import { GtfsParser, extendedGtfsProfile } from 'minotor/parser';

const parser = new GtfsParser('gtfs-feed.zip', extendedGtfsProfile);
const timetable = await parser.parseTimetable(new Date());
const stopsIndex = await parser.parseStops();

Times are represented at the minute level (16-bit integers). Parsing can take a few minutes for large feeds.

Stop search (browser or Node.js)

// Text search (supports partial names and accents)
const results = stopsIndex.findStopsByName('Fribourg');

// Lookup by source ID from the GTFS feed
const platform = stopsIndex.findStopBySourceStopId('8504100:0:2');

// Nearest stops within 500 m
const nearby = stopsIndex.findStopsByLocation(46.803, 7.151, 5, 0.5);

Point query (browser or Node.js)

Find the earliest-arrival journey departing at a specific time:

import { Query, Router } from 'minotor';

const router = new Router(timetable, stopsIndex);

const [origin] = stopsIndex.findStopsByName('Fribourg/Freiburg');
const [destination] = stopsIndex.findStopsByName('Moléson-sur-Gruyères');

const result = router.route(
  new Query.Builder()
    .from(origin.id)
    .to(destination.id)
    .departureTime(8 * 60 + 30) // 08:30 in minutes from midnight
    .maxTransfers(3)
    .build(),
);

const route = result.bestRoute(); // Route | undefined

// Earliest arrival at any individual stop (useful for isochrone computation)
const arrival = result.arrivalAt(stop.id); // { arrival: Time, legNumber: number } | undefined

Query options:

Option	Default	Description
maxTransfers	5	Maximum number of transfers
minTransferTime	2 min	Fallback minimum transfer time
maxDuration	unlimited	Maximum total journey duration from the query departure time
maxInitialWaitingTime	unlimited	Maximum wait for the first vehicle after arriving at the boarding stop
transportModes	all	Restrict to a subset of GTFS route types

Range query (browser or Node.js)

Find all Pareto-optimal journeys within a departure-time window — no journey in the result is dominated by another (i.e. no journey departs later and arrives earlier):

import { RangeQuery, Router } from 'minotor';

const rangeResult = router.rangeRoute(
  new RangeQuery.Builder()
    .from(origin.id)
    .to(destination.id)
    .departureTime(8 * 60) // window start: 08:00
    .lastDepartureTime(10 * 60) // window end:   10:00
    .maxTransfers(3)
    .build(),
);

console.log(rangeResult.size); // number of Pareto-optimal journeys

// Iterate runs latest-departure-first
for (const { departureTime, result } of rangeResult) {
  const route = result.bestRoute();
}

// Or pick a specific journey
const earliest = rangeResult.bestRoute(); // earliest arrival
const latest = rangeResult.latestDepartureRoute(); // latest possible departure
const fastest = rangeResult.fastestRoute(); // shortest travel duration
const all = rangeResult.getRoutes(); // all routes, earliest-departure-first

// Earliest arrival at every reachable stop across all runs
const arrivals = rangeResult.allEarliestArrivals(); // Map<StopId, Arrival>
const durations = rangeResult.allShortestDurations(); // Map<StopId, DurationArrival>

CLI Usage

Parse GTFS data for today and save the timetable and stops index to /tmp:

minotor parse-gtfs gtfs_feed.zip

Start the interactive REPL:

minotor repl

Search stops:

minotor> .find moleson

Query a route:

minotor> .route from fribourg to moleson at 08:00

Run minotor parse-gtfs -h and minotor repl -h for all available options.

Development

Requirements

A working Node.js environment and protoc:

Ubuntu: apt install -y protobuf-compiler | Fedora: dnf install -y protobuf-compiler | macOS: brew install protobuf

Debugging

The REPL (minotor repl) exposes several inspection tools.

Inspect a stop

minotor> .inspect stop <id|sourceId|name>

Inspect a route

minotor> .inspect route <id>

Plot the routing graph

Requires Graphviz:

Ubuntu: apt install -y graphviz | Fedora: dnf install -y graphviz | macOS: brew install graphviz

minotor> .plot from <station> to <station> at <HH:mm> [with <N> transfers] [to <graph.dot>]
dot -Ksfdp -Tsvg graph.dot -o graph.svg

Scripts

Script	Description
build	Compile to dist/
clean	Remove dist/
test	Run unit tests
test:coverage	Unit tests with coverage
e2e	End-to-end tests against real Swiss GTFS data
perf	Performance benchmark (not in CI)
lint	ESLint with auto-fix
format	Prettier with auto-fix
spell:check	Spell checker
cz	Generate a Commitizen commit message

Releases are automatically published to npm on merge to main (stable) or beta (pre-release).

Roadmap and requests

The project is under active development. Use GitHub issues for bug reports and feature requests. For custom development, consulting, integrations, or other inquiries, feel free to contact the author.