a developer-friendly, open-source bus and transit api

Currently being developed with CARTA in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.

Openbus-API is a Node.js application. Get started by installing Node on your development environment, and then use the included Procfile to run.

There's a very good chance the JSON structure of the current endpoints will be changing to better support GeoJSON. GeoJSON support has been implemented. This API should currently be considered unstable. Any apps you build off of it right now will probably break

is a static GeoJSON response with the latest information from CARTA represented as a GeoJSON FeatureCollection. Unfortunately, there's no indication of a timestamp for when information was last received from the bus. The buses which show up on here should all be currently active, as far as I can tell from the data source. Throughout the day, buses will be added and removed from this list automatically.

Sample Output:

{
    features: [
        {
            geometry: {
                coordinates: [
                    -85.2699145,
                    35.05605216666667
                ],
                type: Point
            },
            id: 118,
            properties: {
                color: #FFFFFF,
                direction: North East Bound,
                heading: NNE,
                route: PI,
                routeDirection: N/A,
                stop: N/A
            },
            type: Feature
        }
        ],
    "type": "FeatureCollection"
}

is a server-sent events stream with three types of events:

• add when a bus is added. On first connection, all currently active buses are sent out as add events - similar to scrollback on reconnect for a chat client. This lets you do things immediately, such as draw the initial locations on a map.

• change when any of the properties on a bus object are changed - this could be the lat/lon, the inbound/outbound segment on the route, etc.

• remove when a bus goes out of service and information about that bus is no longer available from CARTA.

The body of the event is a GeoJSON Feature with information pertaining to an individual bus.

event: change
data:
{
    "geometry": {
        "coordinates": [
            -85.26986016666666, 
            35.05618
        ], 
        "type": "Point"
    }, 
    "id": "125", 
    "properties": {
        "color": "#FFFFFF", 
        "direction": "North East Bound", 
        "heading": "NNE", 
        "route": "PI", 
        "routeDirection": "N/A", 
        "stop": "N/A"
    }, 
    "type": "Feature"
}

Example usage from a web browser via the EventSource api:

var busStream = new EventSource('http://api.chab.us/buses/tail')

busStream.addEventListener('add', function (e) {
    // EventSouurce returns data as a JSON string, we must parse it into an Object
    var bus = JSON.parse(e.data)
    console.log('bus added', bus)
})

busStream.addEventListener('change', function (e) {
    // EventSouurce returns data as a JSON string, we must parse it into an Object
    var bus = JSON.parse(e.data)
    console.log('bus changed', bus)
})

busStream.addEventListener('remove', function (e) {
    // EventSouurce returns data as a JSON string, we must parse it into an Object
    var bus = JSON.parse(e.data)
    console.log('bus removed', bus)
})

###Apps built so far include:

• https://github.com/acedrew/chab.us-maps
• https://github.com/jden/silly-little-bus-radar
• https://github.com/jden/bus-sim

Copyright (c) 2014, Code for America. ISC license.