Real-time UK Bus Data Ruby Gem

by maxehmookau • 13 years ago

25 23 13 years ago

This looks pretty neat, could see some good applications being built with this over the Google Maps API!

One thing to note, is that I can't see whether the Gem handles the source being 403/404'd for example, is that something that is handled by the source?

And it was great reading the code, I'm new to Ruby and currently writing my first Gem, it looks like a highly viable route for bus tracking (no pun intended!), very pretty code!

maxehmookau7• 13 years ago

Currently not no. The data is scraped from a site and not read from a nicely formatted API. This is definitely a todo though. Add an issue or better yet, add a pull request :)

coob• 13 years ago

TFL provide proper APIs

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/syndication/defaul...

blocking_io6• 13 years ago

You should use the official API.

http://travelinedata.org.uk/nextbuses.htm

dave1010uk• 13 years ago

http://transportapi.com/ has real time public transport data available everywhere it's provided in the UK, with a much simpler API than other sources (eg SIRI XML feeds from network operators).

maxehmookau7• 13 years ago

Which is awesome. Except if you want to hack on the code yourself. Plus there's a cost involved.

joshmcmillan• 13 years ago

This looks really nice (and helpful!), however:

What are the ethics surrounding scraping unsuspecting websites, these days? Have you seen the proper TfL APIs? (http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/businessandpartners/t...)

oakesm9• 13 years ago

TFL is London only though. It will only provide information for a small part of the UK. Is there an API which provides live data for all of the UK in one?

maxehmookau7• 13 years ago

Not AFAIK. I've attempted to get data out of Brighton & Hove buses before. But again, they represent a tiny minority of the UK population. Traveline's data is the closest I've come to blanket coverage.

maxehmookau7• 13 years ago

As mentioned above. London provides this data, which is great. But me (and the majority of people in the UK) don't live in London. This data is held by Traveline who do not make their data publicly available. As to the ethics, I do not know. I'm not commercialising this as a product, I do not intend to make money from it. As for them being 'unsuspecting'. We live in a age where data is free. They should open up their data or scraping is inevitable.

UnoriginalGuy2• 13 years ago

Unfortunately the local First Bus monopoly doesn't provide real-time data, even though they have WiFi on all their buses (so therefore adding real-time location-data would likely be trivial - if they don't have it privately already, which I strongly suspect they do).

From what I've been told they don't provide this data because they don't want people to figure out how late their services run, and that information could also be used by local councils to do performance analysis (since local council subsidies their services massively, making competition impossible, assuming competition could get a licence at all).

Basically the local bus company acts in a selfish way and we all get to stand in the rain for an extra ten minutes as a direct result of that.

tomaisthorpe• 13 years ago

In Leeds, First Bus do give real-time info. Wonder why it's different here...

UnoriginalGuy2• 13 years ago

Do they have competition in Leeds?

Either way, the local council could have forced them to.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Does this work with all bus services in the UK? I can't find a list of which are supported.

blocking_io6• 13 years ago

It will give you information for any bus stop, but not all of them have realtime data. Some use the timetable. You can ask Traveline for a list of areas where there is realtime data. For some reason the information is not published.

blocking_io6• 13 years ago

I recommend that you do not use this. Traveline provide an official API with up to 180,000 free requests in a six month period.

http://travelinedata.org.uk/nextbuses.htm

maxehmookau7• 13 years ago

I would recommend that you don't use that. This data should be open. It should be quickly accessible. I don't want to have to email someone to ask permission to access data that should be freely available. There's no reason this data shouldn't be more easily available and that's what this gem does. Though I admit, web scraping is never the best way to access data.

blocking_io6• 13 years ago

Traveline are paying another company to extract and normalise the data from the myriad of real time data feeds different bus companies use. Of course, ideally they would all be using open standards. But they aren't. I don't understand why you feel entitled to data which costs Traveline money to produce.

Real-time UK Bus Data Ruby Gem

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