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Berlin public transport in real time

fahrinfo.vbb.de

71–80 of 143 posts

Re: Berlin public transport in real time

#72
post #3

The URL: > http://fahrinfo.vbb.de/bin/help.exe Who would run this on a webserver?

RewriteRule /bin/help.exe /node/whatever.js [L,QSA] # where's your CGI now? I have seen such rewrites in place to keep old CGI URLs from breaking, as their consumers were scattered all over time and space, and it was easier to internally remap the old URLs (which have over the years essentially become a public API) than have them stop working.

Yea, had a colleague many years ago who worked on a very large web site where all the php files ended in .asp

Re: Berlin public transport in real time

#74
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city, Eindhoven in the Netherlands, traffic lights are often calibrated to make sure that buses don't have to stop at a red light.

God, how I wish I lived in the Netherlands...

We need engineers in the Netherlands, so you could move if you really wanted to.

Re: Berlin public transport in real time

#76

Looks like they are just interpolating the location between two stations using the expected arrival times. If no expected arrival times are available, they simply simulate the location to match the planned arrival times. So this is not really "live". > VBB-Livekarte zeigt berechnete Positionen der Fahrzeuge zwischen zwei Stationen; falls kein Live-Fahrplan vorhanden, dann Position gemäß geplanten Fahrzeiten

Agreed, it's not really live, but still cool. There's a similar project for Swiss trains here: http://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/ Source is available on Github (not my project).

The same thing exists for Austria as well: http://zugradar.oebb.at/

Re: Berlin public transport in real time

#78
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's quite easy to make this particular *.exe path return an "Internal Error" by fuzzing the GET parameters, which may or may not be due to someone having written something that parses user-supplied data in C that then segfaults :)

Assuming that they're even using C. It may as well be a dumped executable Lisp image.

The company behind that software, HAFAS (which is used almost everywhere in the German-speaking countries) constantly advertises for C++ and Java positions. As far as I'm aware the main part of the software, including the web facing portions, is written in C++.

The software has a long history, the first webserver with it was started in 1995 and even that most likely reused logic from their first version of 1989. So the language choice is not too surprising.

Re: Berlin public transport in real time

#79

Helsinki has one for their trams, subway and ferries: http://live.mattersoft.fi/hsl/Default.aspx?lang=en I really wish there was this service for buses. Quite often the digital displays saying when the bus will arrive are inaccurate, as are the actual timetables printed on the bus stop (when there is traffic etc.)

Depending on the city, some actually do have live(ish) bus location information available through public APIs.

Los Angeles County was one such I think. I used theirs for some information visualization art projects a couple years ago.

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