Thursday, March 06, 2014

The Simulated Streets of San Francisco


The Transit Map of San Francisco MTA is a real-time simulated map of San Francisco's bus, streetcar, and metro services, based on the MTA timetables. The map animates the movements of the city's buses, streetcars and metro trains on a Google Map.

The vehicle movements on the map are determined by the timetables provided in the GTFS dataset of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. The map works by plugging the city's  GTFS dataset into Vasile Cotovanu's Transit Map library.

Vasile has also released the code for the GTFS plug-in as well. The code converts a set of GTFS files into a SQLite database and the GeoJSONs needed by the Transit Map library. So if you want to create your own simulated animated map of a city's transit network all you need to do is to grab the city's GTFS dataset, use GTFS-viz to create the database and GeoJSON's and then plug the data into the Transit Map library. Voila you have your very own animated simulated transit map.

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