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Comment by miniwark | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Berlin is than there are many operators for public transport by train:

* U-Bahn, for the subways (underground & aerial)

* S-Bahn, for sub-urban lines (mostly aerial)

* Traway in est-Berlin

A map, live or not need at least to combine the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, (and if possible the tramway too), because you generally need to use both networks (with the same ticket) to travel. Staying in only one of the network is just not practical.

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It's such a shame that the official Tram network map [1] almost fits the U-Bahn/S-Bahn map [2], but not exactly.

My assumption is that, when BVG designed these, they had separate maps in mind already early in the process, because including all station names on a tiny printed map is not feasible. With those transparent maps at the trams' windows though, or especially with a digital zoomable map, this would be completely feasible.

According to a BVG email from a few years ago, there isn't even a machine-readable version of this map, which is why I hand-digitised it. [3] So sad because the creativeness of the internet combined with a "remixabe" [4] (or at least forkable) version would likely kick off cool projects!

If anyone wants to attempt merging them, please open an Issue in [5] to let me know!

PS: Do you know about the (experimental) BVG bus map? [6]

[1] https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:d45105f2-6752-4ec5-b882-893657205... [2] https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:60a89e3b-f88d-4d48-b8a6-98ab340ad... [3] https://github.com/derhuerst/bvg-topological-map/issues/7#is... [4] https://github.com/derhuerst/remix-bvg-map-frontend [5] https://github.com/derhuerst/bvg-topological-map [6] https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:ee4647c3-ce1e-4b0a-9546-b1848b85e...

Thanks for the experimental bus map, I wasn't aware of that one!

How about this one? It also includes the rest of Germany:

https://travic.app/?z=13&x=1493233.2&y=6894127.0

Thank you for posting this: This also has the Danish real time data presented in a much cleaner way than the various web services of our local operators.

Even though it is a great project/product, note that it does not have realtime data in Berlin/Brandenburg. It interpolates the position based on schedule data [1].

[1] I assume based on https://daten.berlin.de/datensaetze/vbb-fahrplandaten-gtfs

Aw, too bad. Here I was, already getting excited that they had real-time data.

AFAIK they do in some places where realtime data is available under and open license and in an acceptable format, e.g. in Switzerland.

shameless plug: I build a tool that polls VBB's (or any other compatible) API and produces a GTFS-Realtime feed. [1]

[1] https://github.com/derhuerst/berlin-gtfs-rt-server

This exists, built by the VBB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32647874

Note that this also just interpolates the vehicles' positions based on their delay, which in turn is calculated based on periodic pings that the vehicle sends AFAIK.

So the map does not show realtime positions in the same sense as e.g. HSL's trip planner does. [1][2]

[1] In the departures section on the left, tap on one of the upcoming departures to see the vehicle in realtime: https://reittiopas.hsl.fi/terminaalit/HSL%3A1000105?locale=e... [2] https://digitransit.fi/en/developers/apis/4-realtime-api/veh...

There's actually a button in the upper right corner to enable both S+U Bahn! Although the app gets a little sluggish for me when I enable them both.

When you say "operator": isn't it all BVG?

The S-Bahn is run exclusively by the DB subsidiary S-Bahn Berlin

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