Trip Planners Used in Public Transportation. Case Study on the City of Timişoara

Having easy access to information became vital for people living in the 21st century but most of all for passengers and commuters. As a response to this demand, public transport operators along with municipalities and software engineers started creating a variety of programs called trip planners that have the main purpose to inform passengers about: arriving time, routes, prices, distances, points of interest, location, connections with other means of transport, number of transfers and other information. This paper analyzes the importance of trip planners for public transportation operators and for passengers who use public transportation. The authors present trip planners used today in different cities from different countries and information provided to passengers. There are two types of information: basic information, vital for passengers, that all trip planners should provide and complex information which can be extracted in the near future from the new design trip planners. The paper shows how a trip planner can be built, based on a certain algorithm, the inputs of data that are required and the generated outputs. The trip planner presented in the paper is designed for the city of Timişoara (Romania) and links the city's transportation ways such as: air, rail and road with all the other transportation modes.