Dear Kevin, Nils, and Christian,
My name is Shyam Pandey, and I am a third-year B.Tech student interested in contributing to OpenStreetMap through GSoC 2026.
Over the past 2–2.5 months, I have been actively contributing to the iD editor and participating in issue discussions to better understand the ecosystem. My GitHub username is:
https://github.com/shyam-123pandey
While exploring the project ideas, I found the proposal “Valhalla – Make GTFS/Public Transit Production Ready” particularly interesting. From my understanding, the goal is to make Valhalla’s GTFS-based transit routing scalable and robust enough to support many GTFS feeds and operate reliably on a public instance.
Before writing a full GSoC proposal, I wanted to better understand the technical challenges involved. To structure my understanding, I prepared an initial system design outlining possible components such as GTFS feed downloading, validation, parsing, graph construction, and integration with the routing engine.
You can view the draft system design here:
https://app.eraser.io/workspace/ow1UFTDOzFtT44Ghvznl
This design is only a preliminary exploration, and I would greatly appreciate any feedback on whether this direction aligns with the current challenges in Valhalla’s transit pipeline.
I previously shared my project idea through a direct message but may not have reached the right place, so I am sharing it here to request feedback and guidance on how best to approach this project.
If there are specific areas of the transit system that would benefit most from investigation or improvement (for example feed ingestion, graph building, routing performance, or feed updating), I would be very interested in studying them further.
Thank you for your time, and I would appreciate any suggestions or pointers to help refine this idea.
Best regards,
Shyam Pandey
GitHub: https://github.com/shyam-123pandey