mavrovde/viafrei-mcp

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

Free. No account, no API key, no sign-up. One line and your assistant knows whether the A8 is jammed, whether your train, bus or tram is late, where the nearest fast charger is (and whether it is free, where the operator publishes that), which hydrogen station takes a lorry, whether the lift at your station works and whether the road ahead is forecast to freeze — from official German open data, live, with the source named in every answer. And every German motorway has a live page of its own on viafrei.de, with a map.

Beta. ViaFrei is being stabilised: sources are still being added, and answers and coverage can change. The answers are written by an AI assistant from our data, and AI can make mistakes, so check anything important (a closure, a departure, a price) against the source each answer names.

New in 2.1.18: the website shows the tools’ live answers. The figures on the viafrei.de home page now stand beside the question you could ask your assistant and what ViaFrei’s own tools answer to it right now, with the tool’s name, the data’s time and every source credited. A place’s cards (warnings, roads, places nearby, charging, parking) carry the answer for that place. It is the same answer your assistant gets through this connector.

New since 2.1.13: a live page for every German motorway. All 122 of them, in seven languages, at viafrei.de/en/motorway and viafrei.de/de/autobahn. Each page has a map of the road with its closures, jams and roadworks, a strip of its junctions you can filter by stretch and direction, the full closures planned for the next seven days with their signed detours, lorry parks with free spaces, chargers by power class and the longest stretch without a fast one, road weather and DWD warnings, traffic cameras, the dated lorry ban, and the interchanges with the motorways each one meets. Fuel prices load only when you click. The home page lists the ten worst motorways right now, and every place page has an Autobahn card with the motorways nearby. 2.1.17 made the pages easy to find: a search title and description per page in every language, an opening sentence an AI answer can quote, a redesigned motorway catalogue on the home page, and a robots.txt that names the AI training crawlers. More in Motorway pages.

The site’s cards now say what the tools say. The charging, transit, road and parking cards on viafrei.de answer from the same rules as find_charging_station, check_transit_disruption, check_road_status and find_parking: one charger listed once, a status judged by the same freshness rule everywhere, VBB’s live feed for punctuality in Berlin and Brandenburg, shared bikes near a stop, the Land traffic feeds and Hamburg’s cameras on the road card, and the share-alike lorry parks and P+R sites in blocks of their own. get_driving_rules now opens its lorry-ban answer with the next ban day, dated.

Earlier in 2.1: hydrogen stations (find_hydrogen_station), company offices in find_poi and what is mapped at an address in find_address, more city roads (Bremen, Kassel, Leipzig, Rüsselsheim am Main, Schleswig-Holstein’s large bridges), Kassel’s car parks, 23 more charge-point operators, and a jam rule that no longer calls a lane narrowing a jam. Every source is listed, with what it feeds and what we hold back, in SOURCES.md; the CHANGELOG has the whole list.

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🧳 What you can ask

You don’t need to know any tool names. Ask the way you’d ask a friend who happens to have every German traffic feed open. German or English; the answer comes back in the language you asked in.

What the answers cover, honestly. Live traffic is the motorways. Closures and roadworks also cover federal roads, Land roads in Niedersachsen, Sachsen, Thüringen and Baden-Württemberg, the city streets of Hamburg and Bremen, the traffic reports some Länder and cities publish (Baden-Württemberg, Schleswig-Holstein, Berlin, Hamburg, Köln, Hannover, Kassel, Leipzig, Rüsselsheim am Main), and the state of Schleswig-Holstein’s large bridges; other city streets are not covered. Departures cover every German stop from the timetable; a live delay appears where a realtime feed carries that trip, and otherwise the answer says the time is the plan. Live parking and charging occupancy exist only where the operator publishes them, and an answer never reads “no data” as free. Fuel prices cover the stations we watch, not all of Germany. A charger’s live status counts as current only while it is younger than its feed’s own window; older, it is shown with its time as possibly out of date. Hydrogen stations are H2 Mobility’s published list: pumps and opening hours, but no availability, price or working state, so check before you drive. Places and addresses come from OpenStreetMap, so what is not mapped there cannot be found, and ratings are not part of it. A watch lives in the conversation that opened it: the server keeps every change there, and your assistant shows it when you ask, or on its own if your client supports MCP notifications. Nothing is sent by e-mail or SMS. Up to 10 watches per conversation, each for up to 24 hours (3 by default), and a road is watched as a whole, not one section of it.

💬 Real answers

These came back from the production server at https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp. They are not mock-ups. The first three were asked of server 2.1.17 on 2026-10-14, around 22:40 Berlin time, minutes after it went live. The next three were asked of server 2.1.8 on 2026-10-13 around 22:40, three more of server 2.1.5 that afternoon, between about 14:50 and 16:20, and the others of server 2.0.10 that morning around 06:41. Those were asked again of server 2.1.17 on 2026-10-14 around 22:43 and answer in the same shape; their figures, and the frost warning, belong to the moment they were captured. Each one shows the first lines of what the tool returned, and the source line as it was sent, shortened where marked.

On viafrei.de the same data is on the page: the home shows cards for one place, public transport first, then fuel, parking, roads, the motorways nearby, charging, weather and what is nearby, and German towns and cities have place pages under their full names, where each card row with its own point links to OpenStreetMap’s map. Since 2.1.9 the cards answer by the tools’ own rules, so a card and an assistant asked about the same place say the same thing:

• charging: one charger published by two feeds is one row, a site whose every point is closed is not listed, and each row says “1 of 2 free (as of 22:21)”, “occupied”, “out of service”, “possibly out of date” or “no status data”, which is unknown and never free;
• transit: Berlin and Brandenburg take their punctuality from VBB’s own live feed, a railway station’s realtime calls are matched through the national stop directory, and shared bikes within 1 km are listed with their stations;
• roads: the Land traffic feeds and roadworks registers answer a place as they do in check_road_status, every row says where it is, a city’s own street messages are not crowded out by the motorways, Hamburg places name up to two traffic cameras (as links, never an image), and every source behind a row or a count is credited;
• parking: Trucklounge’s lorry parks and the P+R NRW sites appear in blocks of their own, each with its licence’s own sentence;
• the place page adds the low-emission-zone sentence get_driving_rules states for that Gemeinde, and lines suggesting what to ask your assistant to watch.

Each station on the transit card has a line of its own: how many of its lifts and escalators run, each one out of service by name, the platforms the timetable marks step-free, and the car parks and P+R sites within 300 m. The weather card shows the nearest road-weather station’s next six hours, and the fuel card names the two nearest hydrogen stations within 25 km.

Why the source line matters. Every answer ends with one, and it is the licence speaking: show it to whoever reads the answer. Copy the line the server sends you, not the ones on this page, which are shortened. See Using the data you get back.

🛣️ Motorway pages

Every motorway in Germany has a page of its own, 122 of them, in seven languages: the index is at viafrei.de/en/motorway (German: viafrei.de/de/autobahn), and a motorway is its number in lower case — the A7 is viafrei.de/en/motorway/a7 and viafrei.de/de/autobahn/a7. A spelling such as A 7, a07 or BAB7 takes you to the same page.

What the A7’s page holds, from top to bottom:

• One sentence about the road, built from its own data: from Füssen to Flensburg/Harrislee, about 928 km on the schematic line, the Länder it crosses in road order and how many junctions and interchanges it has, followed by what is reported now, with its time. On 2026-10-14 the English page read: “The A7 runs from Füssen junction to Flensburg/Harrislee junction, about 928 km long (schematic), through Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, Lower Saxony, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein, with 141 junctions and interchanges (24 of them interchanges). Reported on the A7 now: 21 closures, 0 jams, 118 roadworks (as of 22:37).”
• A map, drawn on the server: Germany’s outline and the Länder from the BKG’s VG2500, the motorway as a schematic line through the junctions of BASt’s Location Code List, closures solid, roadworks hatched, jams with their delay. Where the list has no course for a stretch the line breaks, and the page names the break rather than drawing across it.
• What is reported now: closures, jams and roadworks under their own heading, then the full closures planned for the next seven days, soonest first, each with the signed detour where Baden-Württemberg publishes one.
• The junction strip: every junction, interchange and triangle in order, with its counts. A form filters the page by stretch (from, to), direction and layer, and works without JavaScript. Each interchange names and links the motorways it meets, and a chosen stretch gives its own length.
• Parking and rest: truck stops, lorry parks and service areas with live free spaces where the operator publishes them, and car parks; the share-alike sources (Trucklounge, P+R NRW, and OpenStreetMap’s car parks at the junctions) in blocks of their own.
• Charging: the chargers along the road with their status, the sites by power class, and the longest stretch with no charger of 150 kW or more. It says where chargers are, never that one is free unless its operator says so.
• Weather: the DWD’s official warnings along the road and the road-surface forecast of its road-weather stations.
• Traffic cameras, as links to the publisher’s images.
• Fuel prices, only when you click: the page itself carries none, and the click loads at most ten stations, each price with its time and the MTS-K note.
• On every motorway: the lorry ban, dated for the Länder this road crosses (whether it holds now, until when, and the next ban days), the advisory speed, the rescue lane and the emergency numbers, in the same words get_driving_rules uses.
• Ask your assistant: how to connect, the address to copy, and two or three questions this page can answer, each answered from the page’s own rows with its time and source.

The index lists every motorway with its live counts, has a search that takes a number in any spelling, a “worst right now” order (closures and jams first, then the longest delay), and an overview map of Germany with the motorways that have a closure or a jam drawn apart. The home page lists the ten worst motorways right now as cards, and every place card set has an Autobahn card: the motorways near the place, nearest junction first, each linked to its page.

Found by search, classic and AI. Each motorway page has its own title and description in every language (“A7 Germany: traffic jams, roadworks, map”), the motorway sitemaps list every page in every language, and llms.txt and llms-full.txt describe the pages; llms-full.txt also lists every motorway page in English and German. robots.txt keeps the AI training and corpus crawlers off the fuel and place pages, names them one by one, and leaves the motorway pages open to every crawler. The fuel prices are a click no crawler follows.

🔌 Connect in one minute

The product is a hosted MCP server. Point your client at it and the tools appear. There is nothing to install, no key to request and no quota to negotiate. Step-by-step guides for each assistant: viafrei.de/en/connect.

Claude Code

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

Claude (desktop app and claude.ai), ChatGPT and other apps that take a connector URL — add a custom connector with this address (in Claude: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector; in ChatGPT the connector settings need developer mode):

https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp

Cursor, and any client with an mcpServers file that takes a url, over HTTP:

{ "mcpServers": { "viafrei": { "url": "https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp" } } }

VS Code (.vscode/mcp.json, or MCP: Add Server from the command palette):

{ "servers": { "viafrei": { "type": "http", "url": "https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp" } } }

Clients that speak only stdio — for example Claude Desktop’s config file (claude_desktop_config.json, opened from Settings → Developer → Edit Config). That is what this package is for:

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

Node 22 or newer. npx fetches the bridge when your client starts it. If the file already has an mcpServers block, add the "viafrei" entry inside it rather than pasting a second block.

An older client on HTTP+SSE is answered too, at https://mcp.viafrei.de/sse. The transport is deprecated in the specification, so prefer the address above when you can:

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

Restart the client and ask one of the questions above.

Where to find ViaFrei

• npm — viafrei. This package: the stdio bridge, for the config line above. Its page shows the current version and this README.
• Smithery — smithery.ai/servers/viafrei/viafrei. Connect through Smithery’s hosted connection, with no local install.
• Glama — glama.ai/mcp/servers/mavrovde/viafrei-mcp. The directory listing for this repository, with the tool list.
• Official MCP Registry — de.viafrei/mcp. The hosted endpoint, as MCP clients and directories that read the registry find it; server.json is the entry. It is republished with every release of this package, after the npm publish, and only when the live server reports the same version.
• For AI tools — viafrei.de/llms.txt and llms-full.txt: what ViaFrei is, how to connect, every tool in one line each, the example questions with the tool that answers each, and the live pages (the motorway index, an example motorway page, the place pages); llms-full.txt also lists every motorway page in English and German.

🧰 Everything it can do

22 tools, 9 prompts, 10 resources and 2 resource templates — server 2.1.22, snapshot of 2026-10-16. Each line is the server’s own words; the full parameters are in API.md.

🚗 On the road

🚆 Public transport

⚡ Charging and fuel

📍 Places and addresses

🚲 Sharing

🌦️ Weather and rules

🔔 Watches

🧭 Prompts — ready-made briefings

Pick one in your client’s prompt menu and fill in the blanks; it calls the right tools in the right order.

📚 Resources — reference your assistant can read

The running server is the source of truth. This list and API.md are rendered from a dated snapshot of it, and CI fails if either drifts from that snapshot. Ask any MCP client for tools/list to see what is live this minute.

Worked use cases

Walkthroughs that chain several tools, each naming what comes back:

• 🛣️ Driving Munich to Berlin: several motorways in one call, roadworks ahead, a fuel or charging stop, and parking at the far end.
• 🚉 The commute that broke: departures, regional disruption, and a station lift that is out.
• 🔋 An EV on a long weekend: charging by connector and power, low-emission-zone rules, and what is around a stop.
• 🚚 Fleet and logistics briefings: a dispatcher’s morning brief, and watches that report a change instead of being polled.
• 🗺️ Building a local guide agent: a vague place to coordinates and back, and what OpenStreetMap’s licence asks of you.

How well it answers, measured: test rounds of up to nearly 3,000 questions in German and English against production, with every finding published.

🛠️ For developers

It’s plain MCP over HTTP. You can call it without an SDK:

# 1. open a session
curl -si https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2025-06-18","capabilities":{},"clientInfo":{"name":"me","version":"0"}}}' \
  | grep -i mcp-session-id

# 1b. tell the server you are ready — the MCP lifecycle requires it before any request
curl -s https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -H 'mcp-session-id: ' -H 'mcp-protocol-version: 2025-06-18' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"notifications/initialized"}'

# 2. ask a question (put the session id from step 1 in the header)
curl -s https://mcp.viafrei.de/mcp \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' -H 'accept: application/json, text/event-stream' \
  -H 'mcp-session-id: ' -H 'mcp-protocol-version: 2025-06-18' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"check_weather_warnings","arguments":{"place":"Freiburg im Breisgau","language":"en"}}}'

• One endpoint instead of a stack of integrations. SOURCES.md lists the more than 140 sources behind it, among them Autobahn GmbH, Deutsche Bahn, DWD, DELFI, VBB, the national access point Mobilithek, MobiData BW, the Bundesnetzagentur, dozens of charge-point operators, H2 Mobility, city open-data portals, BKG, GeoNames, OpenStreetMap and MTS-K. Each has its own format, release rhythm and licence, and they arrive here as one protocol.
• Results are written to be read aloud. A tool answers in sentences an assistant can pass on, says what it does not know (“no status data means unknown, not free”), and ends with the source line.
• Annotated honestly. Twenty of the twenty-two tools are read-only and idempotent (readOnlyHint, idempotentHint), so a client can call them without a confirmation prompt. The two watch tools are not, because opening or stopping a watch changes what the server will tell you later, and their annotations say so.
• Prompts and resources, not only tools. Nine ready-made briefings, and a reference shelf (driving rules, emission zones, emergency numbers, attribution) your assistant can read directly.
• Watches. watch_situation turns polling into a notification for as long as the session lives: a road closure appearing or clearing, a stop’s departures running late, a region’s late share reaching a threshold (a quarter by default), a DWD warning coming into force, a charge point turning free. Three hours by default, 24 at most, and at most 10 per session. What a watch has reported is readable at viafrei://watches and viafrei://watch/{id}, and a client that subscribes to that resource is told when it reports something new. It reaches no inbox and no phone.
• Machine-readable failures, in the bridge too: one line on stderr and a distinct exit code per cause (see below).

Bridge configuration

Many MCP clients can only pass an env block, not arguments, so every option has an environment variable too:

A flag wins over the variable, and the variable wins over the built-in default. A --header of the same name replaces one from the variable; a --header of a different name is added alongside it.

There is no self-hosted ViaFrei. The server is a hosted service. --url is not a way to run your own: it exists for a proxy or gateway in front of the service, and for the stub server this repository’s test suite starts.

When something is wrong

The bridge prints one line to stderr and exits with a code that says what happened. No stack traces:

viafrei: cannot reach https://example.invalid/mcp: host not found (DNS) (ENOTFOUND) - check your network connection; --url only if you relay through a proxy

The same text also goes back to the client as a JSON-RPC error, so an assistant can say what went wrong instead of going quiet.

A slow call may be a retried call. A 429, 502, 503 or 504 is tried again once, after the delay the server asked for in Retry-After, or 250 ms when it asked for none. A connection that fails outright (reset, broken pipe, socket or connect timeout) is tried once more after 250 ms. Two cases are not retried, because waiting would be worse than answering: a 429 with no usable Retry-After, and any requested delay longer than your timeout. An event stream is never retried.

Your timeout bounds each request, not the whole call. Two attempts plus a delay can add up to about three times the timeout, and more if the endpoint redirects. If you need a hard ceiling, enforce it on your side.

An established session may wobble: a dropped event stream is a warning, and the bridge reconnects. It may not stay dead in silence. Several failures in a row with nothing succeeding in between end the process with the code above, so the client that started it finds out.

What the bridge does not do

• No tracking. No telemetry, no analytics, no usage counter, no update check.
• No stored files or credentials. It writes no file outside the OS temp directory. --header is passed through to the endpoint and is never persisted or logged.
• No cross-origin redirects. A redirect off the origin you pointed it at is refused with one line naming both ends, so a server cannot forward your API key somewhere you did not choose. Same-origin redirects are followed normally.

💼 For businesses

• The licence work is done, and it travels with the answer. Each result carries the attribution its sources require. Where a source attaches a condition, the result states it: share-alike is flagged, and the MTS-K purpose limit arrives as a sentence you are meant to show.
• Built for answering people. Live figures, sourced and dated, in the language of the question. Good for travel and mobility assistants, dispatchers’ briefings, customer service and step-free station checks.
• Read the business page: viafrei.de/en/business. It covers six use cases and how to work with us.

⚖️ Using the data you get back

Every result carries an attribution line. Show it to the person reading the answer. The full register is at the resource viafrei://attribution, and SOURCES.md is the readable version: every publisher, what it covers, its licence, and the exact line to reproduce.

Two constraints matter more than the rest, because getting them wrong is a licence breach rather than a style problem:

• MTS-K fuel prices are consumer information only. Any other use is unlawful in any form, raw, reformatted or aggregated, and never for the fuel industry or its IT providers. On top of that we ask for no redistribution at all: answer the person who asked; do not build a product out of it. (This is also why this page shows no fuel price.)
• DELFI’s realtime and disruption feeds are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (its static timetable and stop directory are CC BY 4.0, and so is VBB’s Berlin-Brandenburg feed). Share-alike travels with anything you derive from it: recompute it, reshape it, rearrange it or build a delay table out of it, and that is Adapted Material you must license under BY-SA (art. 1(a) names material “translated, altered, arranged, transformed, or otherwise modified”). Merely showing it beside another source’s data is an aggregation and puts no obligation on the other source. The realtime feeds’ catalogue records name no licence version, so do not rely on one for a derivative; SOURCES.md has the detail, and also covers the two share-alike databases under the ODbL (OpenStreetMap and one lorry-park operator).

See also NOTICE and LICENSE.

🗣️ Tell us when an answer is wrong

ViaFrei is live, free, and still growing. Some sources are thinner than they will be, and a tool can be slow or wrong. A tool that fails is something the server sees. A tool that answers confidently with the wrong thing is not. Use the A tool answered badly, or not at all issue template, saying what you asked and what came back. That report is the one thing we cannot get any other way.

The server itself

The MCP server is a hosted service, and its source is closed. It is not in this repository and is not published. What is public is the part meant to be: the tool names, descriptions, input schemas, result shapes and attribution lines, which is everything a client reads from tools/list. We say this plainly so nobody spends an evening looking for the server code.

Contributing · Security · Licence

• Contributing: yes, please. See CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. The bridge is small and self-contained, which makes it a good place for a first patch.
• Security: never open a public issue for a key, a token or anything that looks like one. SECURITY.md has the private reporting path.
• Licence: Apache-2.0 for this code. Data obtained through the server keeps its provider’s licence; see NOTICE.