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Live map of public transport in Belgium

openbaarvervoerbelgie.be

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: Live map of public transport in Belgium

#22

Really nice! The place names are a little hard to read especially in dark mode, other than that great job! Thanks for sharing!

That’s because dark mode itself is hard to read. Use normal mode like god intended your eyes will thank you.

Re: Live map of public transport in Belgium

#23
post #21

feel like its computed from the time table and not live or am I mistaken?

It depends.

From: https://openbaarvervoerbelgie.be/over-ons/

* For companies publishing real time positions (STIB-MIVB, TEC), live position will be shown. For companies that don't (De Lijn, NMBS/SNBC), we calculate the position based on the schedule (GTFS), corrected with published delays (GTFS-RT).

Every vehicle on the map is labeled with realtime / calculated position.

Re: Live map of public transport in Belgium

#24
post #21

feel like its computed from the time table and not live or am I mistaken?

When you hover over a dot you can see whether it's the real position or whether the position is computed from the timetable with delay applied. The transparent yellow dots are computed, the opaque yellow dots are real position. Same for transparent vs opaque gray and orange dots; the blue dots all appear to be computed (makes sense, the NMBS doesn't provide real-time info about where trains are as far as I know).

Re: Live map of public transport in Belgium

#26

Would be perfect post end of January for next FOSDEM.

For Tokyo, https://minitokyo3d.com/ is just based on a static GTFS file. Or is it realtime? Nobody knows the difference.

(I'm joking. Local trains in Tokyo area are late quite often. Doesn't matter much when there's one every <5 minutes though.)

Re: Live map of public transport in Belgium

#29

This is well made, would love to have this in my own country as I can never trust the actual timers on the bus stops. How do you get access to the data? Is it a public government API? How did you manage to map all the routes too?

What country are you in?

There are a bunch of different protocols used to exchange scheduled and live transit information out there. And there are also a lot of different companies actually operating the vehicles (Transport Authorities). Sometimes several within one large city. But even if they have different systems underneath often they expose one of the popular protocols. Often there are even rules/law about certain protocols that you HAVE to support.

In USA that is mostly GTFS and GFTS-RT. I dod not think its a law but something about what you have to do to get funds maybe? I'm in Europe so my memory is foggy.

In EU I believe its NeTEx and SIRI. And every member nation needs a national hub where all transport authorities shares its data openly.

GTFS + GTFS-RT is very popular among consumer apps since its both pretty simple and pull-based. Static data is in CSV-files in a ZIP-file and the realtime data comes via Protobuf. If you check sources on the page this post is about you will se many GTFS sources. Ofc even transit systems built for the european standards can expose GTFS via a translation layer to support a broader range of consumers easily.

When it comes to signs at bus-stops there are those that are fed with this kind of data and can show both timetable data and realtime data based on the vehicles position. Here those signs are everywhere (Sweden) and I know there are plenty in the rest of Europe aswell. Outside of that I don't know if they are used as much.

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