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OpenTripPlanner Project History

OpenTripPlanner was seeded by Portland, Oregon's transit agency TriMet with a Regional Travel Options grant and opened with a 3-day Kick-Off Workshop in July of 2009 bringing together transit agencies and the authors of the major open source transit passenger information software of the day: David Emory of FivePoints, Brian Ferris of OneBusAway, and Brandon Martin-Anderson of Graphserver. From 2009 through 2012, development was coordinated by New York nonprofit OpenPlans. In 2011 a second workshop was held to mark the end of the first phase of development. TriMet's 2009-2011 OTP Final Report summarizes progress at that point.

The project has since grown to encompass a global community of users and developers. By early 2013, OpenTripPlanner had become the primary trip planning software used by TriMet in the Portland regional trip planner and was backing several popular mobile applications. Public-facing OpenTripPlanner instances were available in at least ten countries throughout the world. At this point the OpenPlans transportation software team became the independent consultancy Conveyal. The original OpenTripPlanner development team from OpenPlans still actively participates in programming, design, and community coordination via the mailing list and their roles on the OTP Project Leadership Committee.

In summer of 2013, the OpenTripPlanner project was accepted for membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). SFC handles the legal and financial details common to many open source projects.

In 2013-2014 OpenTripPlanner was a focal point in the Dutch Transport Ministry's MMRI (MultiModal Travel Information) project which encouraged investment in trip planning platforms and services. A consortium of five companies worked together to improve OpenTripPlanner performance in large regional transport networks and account for real-time service modifications and delays.

In the fall of 2014, Arlington, Virginia launched a new commute planning site for the Washington, DC metropolitan area, depending on OpenTripPlanner to weigh the costs and benefits of various travel options.

In 2015 the New York State department of transportation's 511 transit trip planner began using OTP to provide itineraries for public transit systems throughout the state from a single unified OTP instance.

After seven years of hard work and almost 10,000 commits from over 100 contributors around the world, OTP version 1.0 was released on 9 September 2016.

Starting in early 2016, the regional transport authorities of Helsinki, Finland (HSL) and Oslo, Norway (Ruter) began using a completely open source passenger information system based on OpenTripPlanner. National-scale OpenTripPlanner instances are also maintained in Finland and Norway.