Using GTFS-RT, the current positions of transit vehicles can be monitored.

Originally, the G in GTFS stood for Google. It initially started out as a side project to incorporate transit data into google maps in 2005. Since then, it has become the de facto standard to represent transit information. Due to its wide use, the G in GTFS was renamed in 2009 to General to prevent people shying away from using the standard. Also see https://wikipedia.org/wiki/gtfs for more information.

On top of GTFS, some agencies also provide real time information such as locations, updates, and alerts in the form of real time information. One website that aggregates some of this data is ovapi, which provides lots of live locations of vehicles every 30 seconds.

Using a simple python script, we can request these live locations. Together with the static information from GTFS, we can then provide information about the name and type of the transit provided.

The heavy lifting in the script is done by pandas, after which the results are plotted by bokeh. The result can be seen at https://gtfs.sgeboers.nl.

See https://git.sgeboers.nl/sgeboers/gtfs.git to access the code.