This is the kind of information which should be freely available for all public transport. Tfl are a shining example of the right way to support developer communities and help them bring better information in a multitude of formats to the traveling public.
Tragically other data holders in the UK lag far behind.
Weekend project of a friend and I uses live London Underground tube line status to improve route planning. Its still in a very rough state, but feedback of any kind would be very interesting to hear. Thanks.
http://www.livetubemap.com/
Nice to have routing that takes live status into account, but it's a bit limited since it only does station->station and doesn't do buses. Often if a line is closed you're better off going to a different, nearby station and walking or taking a bus rather than trying to get to the exact one you normally do.
That's a very good point and we want to add that feature. Is the fact that it redraws the map based on the current state of the lines visually useful? I would like to redraw the official tfl underground map
Yes, I rather like it. In fact, with the appropriate lines removed, 90% of the time I wouldn't even need it to navigate for me - and it's definitely good for more fuzzy journey planning.
I can't see such a thing anywhere on their website, but in stations TfL often have the inverse; a map showing the closures with the rest greyed out. I've always felt that's the wrong way around.
Thanks. We felt for London commuters just the live image of the map would be enough to enable them to visualise their route. And for tourists/infrequent users the added route planning would show them how and why they should take a particular journey.
You can also manually open and close stations/lines and get instant feedback on how that effects the planned journey (although this is mainly hidden in the UI)
Just a heads up, the schematic Tube map is updated every 3 or 4 months. A member of my team tried mapping the points manually with appropriate curves in Canvas, ultimately it was a bit of a nightmare without the original Illustrator SVG file. It might be a painful task for you.
This is great, I'll forward over to the guys working on the replacement to our current Flash version.
The data you are using will be superceded soon with a new API with more rich information at a lot lower latency (don't worry we won't decommission the old one for a long while).
We'll be mailing all our subscribers in the very near future for early access.
The key concept which we considered interesting was that the image of the underground map also updates to reflect the current status of the lines. Giving instant visual feedback.
I just watched one of the trains labeled "Northern train to unknown" derail and run across Bloombury neighborhoods without need of rails until it ground to a halt and vanished.
I have to wonder if Harry Potter was on that train....
It's a nifty idea, but sadly there's some problems either with the data, or how the data is being handled - it's currently showing trains running on parts of a line which are shut down for engineering work this weekend. (Northern Line, Camden to Charing Cross). There's also a train running under Bloomsbury without a line to run on...
It's more a work of art ;-) I basically show the data I get, but I don't fully understand it all - those Northern line trains all have a 477 id, which I think may be ghosts or tests or something else. Trains can jump lines if they're, for some reason or misparse, going straight from one station to another much further down the line.
Improvement suggestion: Interpolate between the transmitted positions for a smoother animation. It's really difficult for me to detect movement directions at something like 3Hz.
That is exactly what is happening. The positions of the trains are only available only every minute or so. I expect the animation speed is limited to 3fps due to performance issues.
Thanks :-) I like to think they'd seen my original version, who knows, so don't mind my backport. Theirs was a bit snazzier, but far too empty for my liking!
>> "Live departure data is fetched from the TfL API, and then it does a bit of maths and magic"
Even though this actual service is probably not so accurate, it does give an interesting view on what the transportation information services can become in the future!
The transportation companies probably do already have the data anyway...
A variety of reasons, including having to change stuff anyway for Google Maps v2 deprecation, preferring OSM's open model to Google with MapMaker, preferring Leaflet, and yes, possible cost too.
Really neat stuff, but knowing how paranoid TFL and our current overlords are and the hysteria around 7/7, I'm sure someone will get rattled about this (even though its of no use to terrorists).
Our company worked on this (http://planefinder.net), the data is actually live ADS-B information rather than a simulation based on scheduled departure times and destinations. I'd say that's a lot worse!
I could stare at this for hours! Not sure if its a coincidence, but I waited for a plane that would fly past my town (no other planes nearby). When it got reasonably close I looked out of my window and there you have it, plane in the sky. I'd like to think it's the same one.
This helps me track my gf while she is working hah! I love this. Do you know the delay on this one? I heard there needs to be a delay of a few minutes when tracking aircrafts? Are you able to confirm? Beautiful work.
And beautiful work to the UK's underground rail tracking as well.
This first appeared a couple of years ago and shortly afterwards TfL pulled the API, apparently due to excessive demand. Going to check my little app to see if the original API is back up ..
Tragically other data holders in the UK lag far behind.