tech posts all posts
Reading RailAir operate luxury coach routes connecting Heathrow Airport to major rail stations in Reading, Guildford and Woking. This encourages people catching flights to lower their carbon footprint by choosing public transport for their inbound and onward travel. Reliable real time information is key to building trust in public transport, and for no group of...
Bus route geometry is a fundamental building block for public transport information. Bus schedules tell you which buses will depart what stop, when, and bus stops often have a point latitude and longitude associated with them. But without the street-level geometry between stops, bus routes are jagged, cut across the road network, and do not...
Showing the location of buses on a map is a game-changer for Real Time Information. No matter how accurate the predicted arrival times of buses at stops, this information alone falls short of the Uber app experience that users now expect. Telling a user that a bus is three minutes away is useful, but without...
Data quality is fundamental to everything we do at TransportAPI. We ingest data sources from across the industry and have learned the signs of what good and poor quality data looks like. We mitigate for issues as much as we are able, but fundamentally, improvement is driven by reporting specific problems back to data source...
At TransportAPI we are lucky enough to see the things that developers using our API build every day. There are some magnificent examples out there, from the First Bus app with its need for high quality data, high performance and robust architecture. Through to Balena IO’s Chris Crocker-White who developed a Raspberry Pi powered live...
At a time of huge change in public transport due to CoronaVirus it is especially important to have the most up-to-date information on your journey. However, until now non-rail disruption information has been published separately by each operator and/or local authority and there was no one place to go for updates on the services you...
We’ve recently been converting our bus and train timetable data to GTFS. The General Transit Feed Specification is a simple data format for representing transport timetables as CSV files. Put forward originally by Google, it is now a widely adopted standard, particularly in the US, but increasingly in Europe and here in the UK. We...
Future Cities Catapult recently asked us what areas UK bus operators cover. We deal with data from over a thousand UK bus operators. In general an operator will run bus services within a particular region, but some larger ones (and particularly operating “groups”) cover multiple regions. We decided to take a look at some of...
TransportAPI is available without signing up, in an offering supported by Future Cities Catapult. It’s something we mentioned briefly before, but how does this work? And what are the differences? How to use TransportAPI URLs are described in our API reference docs. Simply use any URL with an fcc. prefix, and without the app_id and...
We offer bus information, query-able by bus stop, giving timetable data at one endpoint, and live data at another. We always regarded these as belonging quite closely together, and the response structures were always arranged in a similar way (a set of departures optionally grouped by line). But recently we’ve been working to bring the...
