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ViaFrei

German open mobility data as an MCP server: ask a question in plain German or English, get a real answer from official sources — no API key, no account, no plumbing.

ViaFrei is a hosted Model Context Protocol server. It takes twenty-one open datasets from sixteen publishers — Autobahn GmbH, Deutsche Bahn, DWD, DELFI, BKG, GeoNames, OpenStreetMap, MTS-K and the rest — and exposes them to any AI assistant as 20 tools, 10 resources, 2 resource templates and 9 prompts. This repository holds the small stdio bridge (npx viafrei) for clients that cannot speak HTTP; most clients connect straight to the endpoint and need no package at all.

The endpoint

transport	URL
Streamable HTTP — use this	https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp
Legacy HTTP+SSE — only if your client speaks nothing newer	https://mcp.viafrei.de/sse

MCP protocol version 2025-06-18. serverInfo reports name viafrei and the current release as its version. Capabilities: tools, resources (with subscribe), prompts, logging.

Thirty seconds

claude mcp add --transport http viafrei https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp

Then ask your assistant:

Gibt es gerade Stau auf der A8?

Or, for a client that only takes an stdio server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "viafrei": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "viafrei"]
    }
  }
}

Full walkthrough per client: Connecting your assistant.

What it covers

area	the question	tools
Motorway traffic	jams, closures, what is reported this minute	check_autobahn_traffic
Road state	is this road open, now or in the coming days	check_road_status
Roadworks	what is planned on one motorway in a date window	find_roadworks_ahead
Parking	where to stop, rest or leave the car (at most 10 sites per list; share-alike sources come back as a separate list)	find_parking
EV charging	plug, power, price, and what is free right now	find_charging_station
Fuel	cheapest stations for one grade near a place	find_cheapest_fuel
Filling stations	which station: brand, name, open now or at a time, open 24 h	find_fuel_station
Rail departures	next departures with delays, platforms, cancellations	get_train_departures
Bus, tram and other stops	planned departures from any stop — listed, but returns no departures until the national timetable is loaded; use get_train_departures for DB stations meanwhile	get_departures
Step-free access	are the lifts and escalators at a station working	check_station_facilities
Local transport	is a region's public transport running normally	check_transit_disruption
Weather warnings	official DWD warnings in force for a place	check_weather_warnings
Rules	zones, speed, winter tyres, alcohol, tolls, equipment, EVs	get_driving_rules
Places	a name, a business, an address, a coordinate, what is near it	find_place, find_poi, find_address, describe_location, find_nearby
Watches	be told when something changes, instead of asking again	watch_situation, stop_watch

Times are rendered in Europe/Berlin. Every tool takes a language parameter (de or en) and answers in that language — place names, station names and road numbers are never translated.

Address and point-of-interest lookups are OpenStreetMap-derived and cover all sixteen Länder (measured 2026-09-27).

One thing to read before you ship

Every tool result carries an attribution line. It is not a caption: several of these licences terminate when the condition is not met, so the line has to reach the person reading the answer. When a result carries _meta.purposeNote, reproduce that sentence verbatim as well — it is a legal condition of the data.

Two obligations can be breached without noticing, and both are spelled out in the repository's SOURCES.md:

• MTS-K fuel prices are consumer information only. Show the price to the person who asked. No redistribution in any form — not raw, not a table, not an average, not a chart, not a derived dataset.
• DELFI public-transport realtime is CC BY-SA 4.0. Share-alike travels with anything you derive from it, and it may not be blended into a work you publish under another licence.

The authoritative, always-current register is the resource viafrei://attribution on the server itself. Read it before you decide what you may do with what comes back.

Pages

• Connecting your assistant — every client, every transport, and how to check it worked.
• Tools at a glance — all 20 tools with their parameters, plus the resources, templates and prompts.
• Roadmap — what is intended next. No dates.
• FAQ — free, limits, languages, commercial use, logging, reporting a problem.

Walkthroughs

• Use case Driving Munich to Berlin — briefing a motorway drive end to end.
• Use case The commute that broke — rail, local transport and a lift that is out.
• Use case An EV on a long weekend — connectors, power, and the zone at the far end.
• Use case Fleet and logistics briefings — a morning briefing agent, and the fuel rule it must respect.
• Use case Building a local guide agent — names to coordinates and back, under the ODbL.

Use cases

Ideas for what you can do with it, written for three kinds of reader.

For travellers — ask in plain words, get the live answer:

• Use case The lorry driver and the legal break — lorry parking, closures tonight and the Sunday ban, asked during a break.
• Use case First road trip in Germany — the emission sticker, speed, winter tyres and weather warnings for a family new to German roads.
• Use case Driving Munich to Berlin, Use case The commute that broke, Use case An EV on a long weekend — the walkthroughs above.

For developers — connect, call, subscribe, and keep the attribution:

• Use case A commuter bot that speaks up — watches and resource subscriptions instead of polling.
• Use case Embedding ViaFrei in a travel app — connection snippets, the integration checklist and what your UI must show.
• Use case Building a local guide agent — names to coordinates and back.

For businesses — what it is, what it isn't, how to start:

• Use case Hotels and tourist information desks — the front desk's everyday travel questions, answered with the source named.
• Use case Getting thousands to an event — planned roadworks, arrival questions and the trip home, for organisers and venues.
• Use case Fleet and logistics briefings — a dispatcher's morning brief.

Honest status

ViaFrei is live and free while it stabilises. Some sources are thinner than they will be: fuel coverage is a limited set of stations on the publisher's terms, find_parking answers today with motorway lorry parking rather than town car parks, and live charging availability exists only for the operators who publish it — a site with no status is reported as unknown, never as free. Each tool says what it holds. Report an answer that was wrong or useless as a GitHub issue; that is the one failure the server cannot see for itself.