Post by LVF_Admin on Nov 2, 2020 12:38:53 GMT
Well it seems that regrettably the work we are currently undertaking has been made public. I'm annoyed at the way this has occurred as it was so unnecessary and we would like to have made more progress before going public.
I would have to stress that we are still at a very early stage and apart from vehicle data and the fact that it shows vehicles and the routes they are on there is nothing else. The data only updates every 10 mins so not exactly useful at the moment.
To give a bit of background, the DfT is implementing a system to provide real time tracking of all public service vehicles on registered bus routes in England. It is not due to go live until January 2021 however we have become an early adopter of data. Currently there are over 7.700 vehicles that have been identified. This is probably about a half of the total we might expect. We have identified a number of problems with the feed, the most critical of which is that most of the data stops working at 5pm each evening and restarts at 7am.... The biggest problem for us is that the real time data does no more than identify the vehicle, the time and a location in Latitude/Longitude coordinates. No next stop, no predictions etc. The data is wonderful if you are going to plot vehicles on a map eg bustimes.org, but not very helpful if you want a service that looks like LVF. To transition from what we have to what we want means we need to hold timetable and route info. We haven't even started importing that data. Not only does it need to be imported for every route in England but we need to create a process that updates the information whenever there is a route or timetable change.
At this early stage we still need to QA a lot of the data we have, and we still have a large amount of work to do before we can present a working system. We would ask you all show a large amount of patience. The last thing we need at the moment is queries regarding any data you may see which would only distract us from achieving the end goal. There will be a period shortly after the initial release of the new system where we will encourage feedback especially of branding/advert buses and other special liveries.
Brian (owner LVF) & Team
I would have to stress that we are still at a very early stage and apart from vehicle data and the fact that it shows vehicles and the routes they are on there is nothing else. The data only updates every 10 mins so not exactly useful at the moment.
To give a bit of background, the DfT is implementing a system to provide real time tracking of all public service vehicles on registered bus routes in England. It is not due to go live until January 2021 however we have become an early adopter of data. Currently there are over 7.700 vehicles that have been identified. This is probably about a half of the total we might expect. We have identified a number of problems with the feed, the most critical of which is that most of the data stops working at 5pm each evening and restarts at 7am.... The biggest problem for us is that the real time data does no more than identify the vehicle, the time and a location in Latitude/Longitude coordinates. No next stop, no predictions etc. The data is wonderful if you are going to plot vehicles on a map eg bustimes.org, but not very helpful if you want a service that looks like LVF. To transition from what we have to what we want means we need to hold timetable and route info. We haven't even started importing that data. Not only does it need to be imported for every route in England but we need to create a process that updates the information whenever there is a route or timetable change.
At this early stage we still need to QA a lot of the data we have, and we still have a large amount of work to do before we can present a working system. We would ask you all show a large amount of patience. The last thing we need at the moment is queries regarding any data you may see which would only distract us from achieving the end goal. There will be a period shortly after the initial release of the new system where we will encourage feedback especially of branding/advert buses and other special liveries.
Brian (owner LVF) & Team