Tracking real-time locations of trains and buses

[FlippingBinary]

This might be more of a feature request than anything else.

I found MARC in the mobility database, but that wasn't working at all with this integration. I think that's because I needed a static GTFS link in addition to a real-time link. Luckily, the Maryland Transit Administration has a developer resources page with links to all their real-time and static links. Now it works great for showing the next arrival time!

But, now I'm wondering: does it ignore the vehicle location data? It would be nice to have entities with the location data of all the trains so that I can show them on a map and maybe even create automations that detect when I'm on the train.

Even without that, this integration is super helpful, so thanks for making it!

[bcpearce]

Currently it doesn't support vehicle locations. I'm not entirely sure how I could best integrate that since the number of vehicles would change over time and typically the location data would be associated with an entity.

Static data is generally required to get full trip information. Realtime data mostly just has the a trip ID and lacks all of the other database information needed to fill out all the trip details.

If you'd like, you can submit a PR that updates the feeds.json file with the MARC data to make it easier for others to set up.

[FlippingBinary]

Vehicle IDs could be converted to entity IDs with a consistent naming convention so that it's always unambiguously clear which entity refers to which vehicle in the data. New location entities could be dynamically created whenever a vehicle is referenced in the data that doesn't exist as a location entity. Stale location entities could be automatically deleted after some configurable duration of time passes since the last time it appeared in the data.

Do you think something like that could work? Or is there another way you would want to do it?

About the configuration: Since full trip information is generally required, shouldn't the configuration warn if there isn't any static data source? Right now it lets you remove the empty box for static data, so it wasn't immediately clear that it would probably be required. The trouble didn't begin until the next step when the lists didn't populate with stations and it was too late to go back.

[bcpearce]

I did add a new feature in the pre release. It's not using the vehicle updates feed (yet) since I built it primarily for NYC subway locations. But it may be able to detect realtime location down to the nearest stop for other systems as well.

More comprehensive support likely to come later, including for the dedicated Vehicle Position feed urls.

[bcpearce]

As of #93, this is now on master and in the pre-release 0.4.3