What's the most effective routing engine for calculating travel time and distance across mixed transit and walking segments?

For mixed transit + walking routing, there isn’t one universal “best” engine, but the most effective choice in practice is usually OpenTripPlanner (OTP).

Why OTP is often the best fit

• Built specifically for multimodal routing: walking, transit, biking, transfers
• Uses GTFS transit data plus street graphs
• Produces realistic door-to-door travel times with transfer and wait-time modeling
• Good for public transit trip planning APIs
• Widely used and mature

If your use case is different

• High-performance road routing with walking/transit stitching:
  • R5 is very good for accessibility and travel-time analysis, especially at scale
• Fast shortest-path road routing only:
  • GraphHopper or OSRM are excellent, but they’re not as strong for full transit planning
• Research-grade multimodal optimization:
  • Valhalla supports multimodal routing and is flexible, though transit support is not as comprehensive as OTP for many deployments

Bottom line

If you need accurate travel time and distance across transit + walking segments, choose: OpenTripPlanner (OTP)

If you want, I can also compare OTP vs Valhalla vs R5 vs GraphHopper for your exact stack and data format.