Live map of London Underground Trains | Hacker News Reader

Live map of London Underground Trains

traintimes.org.uk

112 pointsnkhumphreys43 comments

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.

Could you explain how this differs from the route planner provided by TFL which also takes into account closures and line status?

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.

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.

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....

See also http://www.demap.info/tetsudonow/ for Japan.

Indian Railways on Google Maps: http://railradar.trainenquiry.com/

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...

So cool but not quite trustworthy!

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.

Yeah, but at the very least, maybe some sort of color coding to suggest direction the train is moving.

The code is on github ;) I only really have time to keep it running and e.g. move it to OSM, but pull requests always welcome.

I'm a huge fan of the Skyfall version. Very well done, cheers!

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...

Cool, would also be curious to see it mapped against the tube map as printed, not geographically accurate.

this kind of information should be available all around the world. Love that the tube has an API for that

Good luck getting access to it though (especially the National Rail one), I tried and failed.

The TFL tube and bus data is effectively open now. I think I actually applied, but the URLs don't need any authentication and http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/syndication/16493.... gives you everything you need to query it.

I know that National Rail is a lot more awkward though.

I came across the same hindrances when trying to build something similar to this. Public transportation data is surprisingly private.

It seems it changed from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap. I would like to know/understand why.

Google Maps, above a certain threshold, is a paid service for websites. I bet on this.

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!

Wow, that's great. Especially love this route finder view: http://planefinder.net/route/EMA/

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.

http://www.flightradar24.com/ does similar, is it related?

No-one has minded for nearly three years, and TfL are the ones providing the data :-)

We won't, this data is readily available on our data page. In fact our new API will have much more information available, with a lot lower latency.

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 ..

Yes, the API returned in December 2010 and has been fine (from my PoV anyway) ever since.

Here's the same thing for Munich: http://s-bahn-muenchen.hafas.de

What maps is it being overlayed? Haven't seen that one before.

It's OpenStreetMap: http://www.openstreetmap.org/

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