Live Transit API

RIDE ON is Montgomery County, Maryland's public transportation bus service. RIDE ON includes over 300 county-owned buses and vehicles that complete over 30 million trips per year. Montgomery County Department of Transportation (MCDOT), Transit Services has equipped RIDE ON buses with Computer Aided Dispatching (CAD) and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) system. RIDE ON's SmartTraveler CAD/AVL, based on ACS OrbCAD technology, reports real time position vehicle and related information. MCDOT manages over 5,000 active bus stops, 80 routes and associated schedules using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology.

Real time bus arrival systems are shown to increase ridership. The County's Transit Services has developed an open API that makes bus schedule and position data - as reported by the SmartTraveler and GIS systems - programmatically available to both the County and public in the form of interoperable Web services. Using this API, you may access read-only information on:


 * Bus stops
 * Bus routes and trips
 * Schedules
 * Bus positions
 * Estimated arrival times
 * Bus stop sign messages

The API uses open software and data standards to publish transit information using HTTP protocol using the RESTful pattern. For example, standards supported include General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and GTFS-realtime for structuring transit content. The Apache CouchDB database provides efficient, high-performance access to transit information.

The API software is released under open source license, and may be accessed on github.

Following is detailed information regarding design and accessing system resources:


 * API - Web service public Application Program Interfaces
 * Architecture - system design, architecture and security
 * Technology and Standards - technology choices and primary system components

The Live Transit API requires you supply an authentication token with each call.

You may obtain a token by registering. The token value is currently provided by the user as a query parameter named "auth_token".

Resources

 * Transit API source code