

Real time map of trains in Japan - moubarak
http://www.demap.info/tetsudonow/

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kkihara
It's real-time in the sense that it's based on the published schedules of the
train lines, but it's not "real" real-time because it is not based on the
actual locations of the trains.

It's not useful at all, but it's a cute visualization and because trains in
Japan run very nearly on schedule during normal operating hours, it will be
mostly accurate the vast majority of the time.

edit : In the "About this site" link on the upper right, it explains that :

① The site uses the scheduled operating information and displays the location
the trains are running on the map at the current time.

② The contents, URL, etc., can change at any time or can be made no longer
publicly available.

③ & ④ The site adminstrator takes no responsibility, etc. You are responsible
for your own actions.

In the other information section, the author specifies that it's for Japan
only and that the icons used are representative for those lines.

~~~
kineticflow
>but it's not "real" real-time because it is not based on the actual locations
of the trains.

It's "real-time" enough in Japan because trains in Japan are almost always on
time.

~~~
rurounijones
Baaahahahahahahahahhahahahaaaaaa

Train was 8 minutes late this morning and 3 lines were stopped. Probably due
to the Typhoon yesterday causing scheduling problems but even on normal days
Japanese trains are not the paragons of time-keeping the west seem to make
them out to be

(Although they ARE miles better than anything I have seen in the UK for
instance.)

[EDIT] Note: Previous poster downgraded the conviction of his statement after
this comment was posted.

~~~
fruwd
What is considered late there? If a train arrives within 6 minutes of schedule
and departs within 11 it's considered 'on time' in my part of Australia.

~~~
rurounijones
Sorry, previous commenter said something along the lines of "Trains always on
time to the second" which prompted my response.

I don't know the exact numbers they use for their statistics (I think it used
to be 1 minute).

If a train is delayed by 10 minutes you can ask for a ticket to take to work
to show your boss that being late was not your fault.

Don't get me wrong, the punctuality is much better than most European
countries I have lived in and quite a lot of the time the are perfectly on
time, but the west has raised the Japanese public transport system to near
mythical status.

~~~
moe
In germany we're glad when the train arrives within the _hour_ that it was
scheduled for...

~~~
arrrg
Not true.
[http://www.bahn.de/p/view/buchung/auskunft/puenktlichkeit_pe...](http://www.bahn.de/p/view/buchung/auskunft/puenktlichkeit_personenverkehr.shtml)

In August 2012, 99.1% of all stops happened within fifteen minutes of the
scheduled time, 94.2% happened within five minutes. Looking only at long-
distance trains, 75.8% of all stops where reached within five minutes of the
scheduled time and 90.5% of all stops were reached within fifteen minutes of
the scheduled time.

~~~
BostX
Not true. Today morning "We appologize bla bla", last Saturday evening "We
appologize bla bla aprox. delay 60 min". In the end it was about 120 min. In
Germany trains do have delays a way TOO OFTEN.

~~~
arrrg
I don’t think you should respond to data with anecdotes. That’s not very
useful.

You might be using a train connection that – for whatever reason (construction
work, etc.) – is consistently late. Sucks for you, doesn’t mean train in
Germany are in general late. Most are on time.

------
exDM69
Actual GPS data from trains in Finland:
<http://www.vr.fi/fi/index/aikataulut/junatkartalla.html> (finnish only)

Close the dialog box that opens, it's a search for trains or stations on the
map.

~~~
bergie
I did a somewhat similar mobile app for Maemo using the open data we have of
Helsinki trams: [http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/buscatcher-
never_miss_another_tram...](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/buscatcher-
never_miss_another_tram/)

Some relevant public transportation data sources for Helsinki:
<http://www.hri.fi/en/data/hsl-reittiopas-api/>

~~~
exDM69
Here's a web service for Helsinki tram GPS data:
<http://transport.wspgroup.fi/hklkartta/>

For some reason it's ridiculously hard to find as it's not linked to from the
pages you usually use to find transportation.

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bdz
Real real time map of trains in Hungary (based on GPS data)
<http://vonatinfo.mav-start.hu/>

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geekstrada
I like this one of the trains in Switzerland. <http://simcity.vasile.ch/sbb/>

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mnutt
This is really cool; a few years ago I wanted to do this for the published
schedules of NYC's subway. At the time it involved scraping schedules from the
MTA website's horrendous HTML, but now it looks like they've completely
reversed direction and have it in an accessible format. Interestingly, they
have real-time data for buses, but not for the subway.

~~~
LeafStorm
On the subway, it's probably harder to get data to the TVS since it would be
transmitting from underneath tons of concrete. They could tie it into the
train control system, but they probably don't want to connect that to the
Internet to prevent the case that someone could take it over and mess with the
subway.

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minikomi
Related .. Something I've been working on to learn d3.js A table of
"happenings" on the Tokyo metro line for the last 30 days scraped hourly from
the Tokyo metro site. The animations are a bit pointless but you get the idea!

<http://poyo.co/metro>

Yesterday's typhoon really messed things up!

~~~
diasks2
Very cool! Do you have any data on how long the "happening" lasted? Would be
neat if you could somehow incorporate that into the size of the circle in the
left graph, or instead of showing the number of happenings on the right graph,
you could instead show the downtime.

~~~
minikomi
Most end in the same way (平常どおり運転しています。 - returned to normal operation) so,
it's possible, sure!

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Zakiazigazi
This is pretty neat (even if not realtime :))

I'd really love to know where the data is coming from.

I played[1] with a similar idea a few months ago creating a simple
visualization just for fun that is more like a timelapse of the "veins of
tokyo" and was curious about the distribution of trains during the day. In my
case, I just scraped the tokyo metro site's timetables, but it's quite a bit
of work to fit the data (identify the trains with rapid/semi-rapid trains that
skip stations, etc) - it's still not easy to know when a train would be
waiting at a station, the best I could have done is guess from the average
time between stations, which also does vary throughout the day. Eventually
only a few lines made it in.

[1] <http://zaki.asia/metro>

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zevyoura
This reminds me of University of Michigan's magic bus service:
<http://mbus.pts.umich.edu/>

Magic bus is run off of actual real-time data, though, unlike this example.

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Zirro
Here's one for Sweden (passenger-trains only): <http://www.tagkartan.se> \-
It's also based off on schedules but updates with delays as soon as they are
announced.

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pkandathil
Apparently in Japan the cell phone reception is great even on the trains. Why
don't ppl download an app where it figures out your gps location, speed and
based on that figures out what train you are on. Then it finds others in the
area with similar info to verify your data and puts it on a map. That way you
know where the train is if you have these groups of people moving very fast
close to the gps location of the railway tracks.

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NiekvdMaas
Here is one of The Netherlands: <http://kubus.mailspool.nl/spoorkaart/>

~~~
huskyr
I always wondered if this one is based on real-time information or based on
the scheduled times as well.

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Infuscu
This is a live map of the trains in and around the area of Copenhagen,
Denmark:

<http://byenspuls.dsb.dk/byens_puls/ByensPuls.html>

The colour of the marker reflect its punctuality, thus yellow means 5-10
minutes late etc.

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arrowgunz
It's somewhat similar to <http://whereisbart.com/>

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timmaah
Built this for the start up I work for. Fun challenge to predict the arrival
times.

<http://uvm.blirpit.com/> (No buses will be active for the next ~6 hours)

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interro
Real time map of buses in Vilnius, Lithuania:
<http://stops.lt/vilnius/#bus/map> It also shows the speed of bus if you click
on a blue bubble.

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twism
Real time arrival times for Boston subway (where available).

<http://wheresthembta.com>

I've never found the maps data viz particularly helpful.

~~~
endersshadow
Except for our beloved Green Line. The oldest subway in the country doesn't
even know where it is--so it can't tell us.

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coderhs
In my firefox 12.0, Linux OS

The train disappears after some time..

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whalesalad
Protip: don't try this in chrome ... the endless auto-translation of the
bubbles (which happens each time a train moves) kills it completely. Looks
decent in Safari though. Pretty neat!

~~~
wideroots
looks great on IE9 as well :)

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alpb
Anyone got it working on iPad? It seems like nothing is moving on the map.
Maybe Japanase servers have a long Round-trip time, I don't know why.

~~~
alpb
Edit: needs zooming.

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jpswade
UK version: <http://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/>

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victorhn
Where do you get the data for the location of the trains? Is there some kind
of data feed?

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GoldiKam
Is it real time data ?

