Publish real time bus locations

[frabcus]

So that people can check easily on an app (preferably a standard national one if there is one!) exactly when the next bus will arrive. Or if it, for example, was early and has already gone, see it has zoomed off on the map.

The important thing here is not the app, and certainly not an app specific to Liverpool (who has time to install those every city they go to!), but the data, and that going into standard existing apps.

Example image from a London app which shows the kind of thing people would make and integrate with if the data in Liverpool was available http://www.trustedreviews.com/london-bus-checker-iphone-app-review:

[brett-lempereur]

This is proposed in the Connected Liverpool programme (Edit: published May 2012). They describe adding real-time public transport information to a "smart city app," but there's no mention of open data feeds in the programme (pp. 89-90).

[davidtweaver]

I'm not sure if the buses in Liverpool use this protocol (or what the legalities of obtaining bus information might be in this manner) - but hackaday had a piece about sniffing the data from bus-stop displays: http://hackaday.com/2013/11/25/sniffing-data-from-radio-controlled-bus-stop-displays/

[MartinLyne]

+1

[KevinJump]

Arriva have a "live" map on their site (doesn't say how live, or indeed if its actual buses or estimates)

http://www.arrivabus.co.uk/journeyplanner/help/en?tpl=livemap&

It's driven by urls like the one below - returning JSON. the map just loads this every 30 seconds.

http://www.arrivabus.co.uk/journeyplanner/query/eny?look_minx=-2997887&look_maxx=-2839959&look_miny=53308648&look_maxy=53402906&tpl=trains2json3&look_productclass=1023&look_json=yes&performLocating=1&look_requesttime=10:00:30&look_nv=get_rtmsgstatus|yes|get_ageofreport|yes|get_rtfreitextmn|yes|get_zntrainname|no|zugposmode|2|interval|35000|intervalstep|2000|get_nstop|yes|get_pstop|yes|get_fstop|yes|get_stopevaids|yes|get_stoptimes|yes|get_rtstoptimes|yes|tplmode|trains2json3|newrgmethod|yes|correctunrealpos|no|livemapTrainfilter|yes|get_zusatztyp|yes|get_infotext|yes|&interval=35000&intervalstep=2000&livemapRequest=yes&ts=20151010&

you can also get a single bus

http://www.arrivabus.co.uk/journeyplanner/query/eny?tpl=singletrain2json&performLocating=8&look_nv=get_rtmsgstatus|yes|get_rtfreitextmn|yes|&&look_nv=get_rtstoptimes|yes|get_fstop|yes|get_pstop|yes|get_nstop|yes|get_lstop|yes|zugposmode|2|&look_trainid=84/9247/18/29/70&

[jamieisboss]

As in the bike data thread #20

http://www.travelspirit.io/resources/ >> https://github.com/luqmaan/awesome-transit

But I'll stop there for a sec, there's a massive project going on around this in manchester http://www.travelspirit.io with a mission that reads:

TravelSpirit is an open collaboration between independent stakeholders, creating a platform for them to deliver Mobility as a Service solutions, enabled by open source licensing and open development, anchored in a public fiduciary entity.

Our mission objectives for TravelSpirit are:

• We will form a community of practice to create new, commercially-viable MaaS solutions built from both existing open source components and new code. Read more.
• TravelSpirit is committed to growing the liberty of its community through open source, open and portable data and open development.
• We are committed to submitting improvements we make to existing code upstream where possible and encourage users of our code to contribute improvements to us.
• To signal and encourage this, all our work will be open source, using the Mozilla Public Licence v2 and compatible licenses. Read more.
• We seek to enable downstream commercial deployment but TravelSpirit will remain a not-for-profit community.
• TravelSpirit will be hosted by a suitable fiduciary and administrative umbrella, who will hold all assets in trust and facilitate open governance by and for actual, current participants in the TravelSpirit community and their successors….read more.
• The community will seek Crowd Funding opportunities. Public sector resources are constrained due to a range of globally developing trends…read more.

And the partners page lists the Department for Transport, Accenture, BT, Barclaycard and Tech North

We're missing the boat it would seem...

But not not get too off topic, there's apparently a standard: the General Transit Feed Specification which has been updated to use realtime data, and another non-competing standard possibly built on top of realtime GTFS called SIRI. An organisation called @OneBusAway seem to mastermind most of this, and there are a boatload of tools to create and consume all of that (that awesome list seems to pretty comprehensiveley list everything, and while it's all American and so some of the legal parts aren't useful the transit wiki seems to have a lot of really useful information)