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A real-time 3D digital map of Tokyo's public transport system
- tkgally 3y agoVery cool. Even the building-by-building graphics seem to be correct: a boxy version of my house in Yokohama is in the correct location and has the correct height relative to its neighbors. The map also shows—correctly—that it is raining at this moment in Tokyo but not in Yokohama.
- gorbypark 3y agoYou can (most likely!) thank the OSM project for the building footprint and height data (along with pretty much all the street data in this map). I've recently been playing with shademap.app and it's pretty incredible for planning a solar panel install. Google Earth has always been able to show you shadows for any given time of day, but only for natural features (mountains, hills, generally the shape of the earth), but doesn't take into account buildings. Shademap is using OSM building data to calculate buildings as well.
- tppiotrowski 3y agoThanks for the shoutout. Shademap is actually really popular with the Japanese and a subset of them use it to plan photography of...trains [1]. It's a fascinating subculture I didn't even know existed. [1] https://rail-log.net/photospot https://rail-log.net/photospot
- patrickscoleman 3y agoI’m currently visiting Tokyo and found the building where I’m staying too. This is so cool! I’ve enjoyed seeing the buses move around on Google maps too. And all the bus times are so accurate at the stops. I wish every city made all this data available.
- Rodeoclash 3y agoThis is great, however on first load I didn't get the trains moving. After a refresh they showed up again.
- qiqitori 3y agoCurrently sitting on the Yokohama line to Hachioji, a little before Hashimoto station. Looking at the map the train had already reached Hashimoto. Seems like we're running 30 seconds or maybe 1 minute late.
- Stevvo 3y agoIs it possible the map is a little in the future for every train, to make sure you arrive on time when using it?
- marban 3y agoEven a 3 second delay is unacceptable in JP ;)
- Washuu 3y agoI had a train arrive two minutes late over the weekend in Osaka and I could see people visibly agitated and worried when looking down the platform.
- throwaway2037 3y agoThe hype about "on time all the time" is a well-loved-by-foreign-media myth in Japan. Yes, many trains are nearly perfect (Shinkansen, especially), but plenty of Tokyo metro lines are delayed by a few minutes during the daily rush hour crush. The point: They run so many damn trains, you can just get on another one.
- david-gpu 3y agoBecause commuters often have tight connections to make and if a train is two minutes late that can be enough to miss the next train and be late to work, which is a big no-no.
- gala8y 3y agoOut of curiosity I checked few cameras and it looks like you're right.
- Andrew018 3y ago[dead]
- notoverthere 3y agoDo any of the 'live' camera feeds work? They're all static for me. This is super cool, though.
- bondarchuk 3y agoThey all work for me, they're just youtube embeds.
- MayeulC 3y agoThey work for me too, despite my slightly hardened browser (firefox, private browsing, no third party cookies, resist finger printing, adblock plus, LibReditect replacing Youtube Embeds with Invidious ones). I was unsure about the 3D aspect (especially since the map surface itself seems flat), but it was quite impressive clicking on live feeds and seeing them match the display (some trains seem to be missing from the live map, and some live cameras are delayed a bit compared to the activity shown on the map -- timestamps sometimes lag by 40s or so).
- sqs 3y agoWow, I love that it shows live flights and airplanes!
- keyle 3y agoAnd ferries. And rain. Brilliant.
- Shinchy 3y agoThis is really awesome, I love the way you integrated the live camera feeds.
- JCharante 3y agoLooking at this map makes me want to move to Tokyo. Sure, the trains stopping at night makes nightlife and catching a morning flight annoying, but train culture* of just making plans to meet at a train station with a friend is so much better than the car dependent place I live. *It's not unique to Tokyo, but I've spent extended periods of time in cities with trains and this is what we often did. Tokyo just has lots of train lines.
- ipnon 3y agoTokyo Just Works. It is inspiring to see a well-functioning civil society. Most emblematic of this is the trains that always arrive on time, are always clean, and rarely get delayed. There is still so much more potential to be had around the world.
- 93po 3y agomy first train experience in japan was it being delayed 2 hours
- Cloudef 3y agoThe trains sure work, a lot of other things are stuck into 90s, especially if you live here
- wkat4242 3y agoLike what? Genuinely interested
- 93po 3y agorace relations
- Cloudef 3y agoFor example digital services for essential government services were brought only recently (mynumber). Its decent but ways behind anything in europe. Digital services in general suck in japan, especially banking where the forms and backends cant handle foreign names, so you often have to send snail mail in the end. Faxes are still common place. Lots of stuff is still handled in paper even if they are submitted digitally so many things are painfully slow, especially anything visa/immogration related. With digital cash there are annoying walled garden economies and i could go on. General stores, restaurant, and public transport work really well however. I will not touch on societal issues or politics, as everyone has their own view on these matters.
- xattt 3y agoI saw 3D in the title and assumed it was a cross-section view of the subway tunnels underground. An implementation like that would be a potential security risk to public infrastructure.
- dewey 3y agoIsn’t this already public data? Apart from that knowing the exists sounds like a bigger security problem than knowing where the tunnels are located.
- dewey 3y agoBerlin edition: https://www.vbb.de/fahrinfo https://www.vbb.de/fahrinfo, there was also a version in a similar 3D style but I wasn't able to dig it up through the search. Related thread with more of these kind of projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32647227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32647227
- ezconnect 3y agoThat was disappointing I thought I would see the 3D train track tubes and how deep they are and their position from each other in 3D
- vinnesc 3y agoI just came from working remotely from Japan for almost two months. One of the highlights was the infrastructure for sure. Tokyo feels like one of the most liveable cities I've ever been to in terms of urban planning and public services. It's surprising how far away from Tokyo you can go in what still feels like the public transport happy path (I went all the day down to Kagoshima) and how many highly populated cities you can reach along the way. Now I'm back to Dublin where I'm permanently based and I feel a type of homesickness that seems to be related to missing that level of "liveability" that Japan has. A lot of things sound like coming straight out of a nightmare for some westerners, such as small houses, small rooms, narrow streets, no sidewalks, small cars and vans. But I enjoy that environment way more.
- my12parsecs 3y agoI live in Japan so this could actually be super useful. How did you make it? Where did you get the real time data from?
- Cloudef 3y agoHmm it seems slightly out of sync, does not match with what I see through my window.
- 3seashells 3y agoThe window lies ? Better have a sensor fusion arbitration service investigate the devices..
- bloopernova 3y agoThis is the kind of thing that makes me aware just how far in "the future" we live. Just imagining trying to explain to myself 40 years ago about what information we'll have at our fingertips. Amazing site!
- JKCalhoun 3y agoNever mind the live "web cams" you can click on in the map UI. Brave new world.
- bclemens 3y agoThis is adorable, it even shows Haneda air traffic!
- hoc 3y agoGreat reminder of the time spend in Tokyo. The video integration even delivers circada chirping, what else can you ask for. Of course, the sync dilemma will not be solveable (at least not at japanese standard levels) for quite some time :)
- nixass 3y agoPrevious discussion (Jan 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765449
- fatih-erikli 3y agoGreat! I wanted to make the same for Istanbul for years but never got a chance spend time on it. It is a perfect example of visualizing time series data. Makes me want to move to Tokyo. My question: Do you fetch the routes somewhere or you simulate the trip start-end times?
- tantalor 3y ago"digital" is not really helping the title
- fragmede 3y agoThis makes me want to play Mini Metro again! https://store.steampowered.com/app/287980/Mini_Metro/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/287980/Mini_Metro/
- lawlessone 3y agoThe live webcams are cool. You can see the trains passing. Not quite in sync though
- reactordev 3y agoWhat’s crazy is that the street camera video feeds have audio!!! This is wild!
- dabedee 3y agoAwesome project! Where is the realtime/live data coming from? Is it approximated via timetables or is something else going on?
- lawlessone 3y agoNot time timetables i think. If you watch the webcams the trains usually pass on the video as they pass on the map.
- tragomaskhalos 3y agoThe London Underground used to have a freely accessible API for real-time data as well, it was useful to curl it to plan when to leave the house :) Sadly no longer.
- infinityio 3y agoAs far as I can tell it's still free for relatively low request rates, but you need to register an account/get an app id from them (I've been doing some testing with it recently as part of an app)
- tinyplanets 3y agoWhat a gorgeous web map! As a GIS Analyst that occasionally gets to work on web mapping technology, this is quite inspiring!
- mastadasta 3y agoNice one
- decafninja 3y agoTokyo’s transit system (or any other characteristic of the city people here so often praise) doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The US cannot reproduce it. And no, the reason has nothing to do with cars which people here so love to blame. Even if a US city were to successfully reproduce all the hardware parts of the Tokyo train system, it would quickly devolve into something like the NYC subway with all its problems.
- jwells89 3y agoPart of it comes down to the country’s culture which has more respect for public utilities overall, but I think another big aspect is that businesses in Japan aren’t nearly as bad as their western counterparts about cutting corners to juice profits, which means things like trains get the level of maintenance and care required to keep them clean, timely, and functional. Of course Japan has its own set of issues — no country is a utopia after all — but livability in the major metro areas is not among them.
- franga2000 3y agoI'd love to hear how it has nothing to do with cars, given the plethora of evidence that car use, the culture around car ownership and the lobbying of car companies created and continue to create a lot of the problems preventing effective public transport development not just in the US but all over the world.
- 93po 3y agothey were specifically saying that even if the infrastructure existed, regardless of lobbying and political influence, it would not work. obviously lobbying and influence is the reason we can't even try.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- haruka_ff 3y agoI wonder how the map handled the accuracy issue of the timetable data: the public timetables are only accurate to the minutes, but the trains on the map are not only arriving / departing at 0 second. I believe accurate timetables that are accurate to 5 seconds (actual accuracy) are not published anywhere. I'm now very curious how accurate the trains on the map are, as there might be up to 55 seconds of error. I don't have too many opportunities to take the trains nowadays, and when I had to take the trains I always forget to check this.