The digitalization of everyday life, where the average bus passenger would rather ignore the surroundings and stare blankly into his phone for snapchat updates, creates great opportunities for digitalization of public transport, as well as some challenges. Ruter, Norway’s largest public transport authority, is putting significant effort into improving digital services for customers.  However, the current technology stack behind Ruter's operations, is not able to provide the necessary real-time information.

In this talk I will explain how Ruter is participating in the development of new European standards for information technology for public transport (ITxPT), and how Apache Kafka and Kafka streams serve as the core components in building "Transport-as-a-Service".