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The Transit App [1] crowdsources position data for vehicles. It's a gamified thing that rewards you with points or whatever for leaving the app running with you
by mikepurvis 4y ago
The Transit App [1] crowdsources position data for vehicles. It's a gamified thing that rewards you with points or whatever for leaving the app running with your GPS on while in motion. This lets them have up-to-the-second knowledge similar to how Google Maps running on phones gives Google live traffic data around the world.
[1]: https://transitapp.com/ https://transitapp.com/
- j0yb0y 4y agoThey also recently released a developer API [1]. The free access looks okay for personal use, I haven’t tried it yet. Oh and if your public transit service has GTFS then just install home assistant and get maps and arrival times. [1]: https://transitapp.com/apis https://transitapp.com/apis
- mikepurvis 4y agoTrue, but I think part of the point is that the GTFS data is subject to the technical competency of your local transit agency, and that seems to vary widely— sometimes they lie about where vehicles are, or pretend that schedule-inferred positions are GPS positions, or they're missing vehicles, or the data is delayed, or whatever. When Transit captures this information from their own users, it's much more trustable— basically all they'd have to watch for is someone maliciously poisoning the data by telling the app they're on a bus when they're really in a car, but that would be a lot of effort to go to just to be a jerk and end up shadowbanned.