HRT Transit Feed Data Dictionary

History

HRVA Civic Hackfest Kickoff - March 2, 2012

Transit Challenge

Against all odds, Hampton Roads Transit went out of its way to publish real time bus data on the web for public use. Our challenge is to create mobile and web apps that answer the questions “where’s my bus?” and “when will my bus be here?” using this data. HRT publishes other useful information for riders that is not optimized for the web or mobile phones. Ever try to look at a route map on a smart phone? Forget about using a text & voice only phone. Let’s change the status quo. By improving access to and usability of HRT’s data we can make the transit system work better for everyone; riders, administrators, and taxpayers. Win. Win. Win.

Process

HRT uses TrapezeITS TransitMaster version 25. There is a client app called Client Monitor. Client Monitor has a feature to write out its data to a log file called SpySocket.log. We enabled logging and chose the location and time point crossing reports to log. That log file is transformed in order comma separate, and to normalize internal route & vehicle identifiers. The log is written every minute. The transformer runs when the file changes. The transformed file is posted to a public FTP site as a text file. A bug in the Client Monitor software prevents us from capping the maximum size of the SpySocket.log. For this reason we have to monitor the file's size and occasionally shut down the process to clear out the data.