Help - tracking bus location?

Open Data
1

Hi all,

Preface to say I’m a complete noob at using APIs. I have an account registered - but have so far been unable to figure out how to do what I need to.

I was close-passed by a bus and want to make a complaint - but am not 100% sure I have the correct number plate (using lvf.io I can see there are two very similar numberplates). What I want to do is find out the position of both buses at a particular time on Wednesday, but all the advice I can find about bus location is in reference to their current or predicted position, not historical.

Can someone ELI5 how to go about finding this data please?
Thank you!!

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Welcome @rhaw95 !

You can get current bus location from the API using

https://api.tfl.gov.uk/Line/1/Arrivals

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You need the know the bus route to do it this way.

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Thanks - unfortunately that doesn’t help me much as it is the location/arrival at a specific time window two days ago that I’m interested in.

If there was a cache of past ‘expected arrival times’ per bus id, route or bus stop that would help - but not seen that so far.

In future, I’ll use the api to check the details immediately!

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@rhaw95 This information is always live. You would have need to be capturing the data already to go back in time.

I’m not sure anyone keeps the bus movement data.

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@rhaw95 You might possibly find what you want on bustimes.org.

For example, this link shows what routes and trips a vehicle with reg no YJ19 HVA ran on Monday 15 April. You can plug different values into the URL.

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@tenbob
That’s a source of which I was completely unaware. It also includes dead runs to garages.

However, I looked at the “all vehicles” data for a couple of routes - 38 and 149 - where I would always expect some journeys to be turned short as part of service control and there weren’t any. Which makes me wonder what exactly is being shown for each individual vehicle.

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