University of Florida Live Bus Tracking

Transloc has created a number of real-time bus tracking maps for universities in the U.S.. The University of Florida Transit map is good example of how Transloc use Google Maps to show the position of buses in and around a university campus.

The map shows the real-time location of buses with color-coded markers. The color of the marker indicates the route of the bus and the arrows show the buses current direction. Users can click on the bus markers to view the bus' destination.

 It is also possible to select a bus route from the map sidebar to view the route on the map and the current position of all buses currently on that route.

The Transat Québec Saint-Malo Tracking Map

The Transat Québec Saint-Malo is an international high-level sailing transoceanic race taking place every four years, from Quebec city, Canada, to Saint-Malo, France.

This year you can watch the race live on Google Maps. The live race map will track each of the multihull and monohull entrants for the duration of the race, which begins on July 22nd. Until the race begins next month the map allows you to replay the 2008 race.

As well as the real-time tracking map of the race there is also an official mobile application. The mobile app will include the live tracking map and also give users access to information layers to better follow and understand the skippers’ moves during the race.

Not only will the mapping application allow users to follow the race, but it will give access to information on all the activities held in Québec City and Saint-Malo before and after the race. It will show where and when program events are taking place and show the locations of the nearest restaurants, bars, hotels, parking lots and ATMs.

Tracking Ice Cream Vans on Google Maps

Summer wouldn't be summer without the unbridled joy of the ice-cream van.

Summer also wouldn't be summer without the occasional disappointment of hearing the bells of the ice-cream van, running indoors, scrambling around trying to find your money, running out onto the street again, only to see the ice-cream van disappearing around the corner.

Thanks to Google Maps the sight of small children crying in the street whilst they stare disconsolately after the missed ice-cream should be a thing of the past.

For the Ben & Jerry's Fair Ice Tour 2012 a Ben & Jerry's ice-cream bus is driving around Germany, Austria and Switzerland giving out free ice-cream. To help avoid disappointment the van can be tracked in real-time on a Google Map.

You can even request that the Ben & Jerry ice-cream van visits somewhere near you by making a request on Ben & Jerry's Facebook fan page. 

The DC Circulator Map is a live real-time map of the DC Circulator bus system in Washington, DC.

The map shows the system's bus routes and the bus stops on each route. It is possible to click on a bus stop marker and find out when the next bus is due. When you click on a bus stop's marker you can also find out about nearby points of interest, including how far they are from the stop and in which direction.

The map also shows in real-time the location of all the system's buses. The bus map markers are color-coded to show which route they belong to and include arrows to show the direction of travel.

Freiburg's Buses Live on Google Maps

Stadtbahn Tracker Freiburg is the second live transit tracking map featured on Google Maps Mania this week (the first was MTA Bus Time). In fact live real-time tracking maps have become so common that it is easy to became rather blasé about them and forget just how amazing it is to track in real-time whole transit networks on a Google Map.

Stadtbahn Tracker Freiburg is a live map of of all tram cabs, buses and local trains in Freiburg, Germany. The developer of this map has taken a novel approach to how he fetches the real-time data of the vehicles. The map loads all departure/arrival times in advance during startup. These times are then updated every 5-10 minutes or so. The calculation of the exact vehicle positions is therefore completed on the client side by JavaScript.

Another interesting feature of this map is that you can query the map by time. For example, you can view the city's transit network during the morning rush hour by attaching a time stamp to the URL, for example http://tracker.patrickbrosi.de/freiburg/?time=1335419192000

New York Buses Live on Google Maps

MTA Bus Time is a Google Map that shows the live position of buses on New York's bus system. Currently the map tracks all bus routes in Staten Island and will be rolled out to other NYC boroughs, with expected completion in 2013.

It is possible to search the map by intersection, bus route or individual bus stop. If you click on an individual bus you can view its next three stops. If you have a mobile phone you can use the QR codes posted on bus-stops to find out when your next bus is due.

Bahrain Grand Prix Live on Google Maps

This weekend's scheduled Formula 1 Grand Prix in Bahrain has been in some doubt but at the moment it looks like the race will go ahead as planned.

Lusob.com has created a Google Map that will hopefully track the race in real-time on Google Maps. The F1 Live Timing Map is currently showing a demo race using imagined data. The map shows the cars moving around the Bahrain Formula 1 track on Google Maps satellite view.

Lusob say that when the race starts the map will connect to the Formula 1 official timings to show the map in real-time. In the demo version you can click on any of the drivers in the map sidebar and the map will zoom to that driver's car marker on the map.

Real-Time Tracking via Google Maps

Track on the Map is a handy Google Maps based application that allows you to quickly and easily share your real-time movements with the world.

To use Track on the Map you just need to view the application with a GPS enabled device, such as your smart phone. You can add a user name and select an appropriate icon and that's all you have to do.

Once you agree to share your location with Track on the Map your real-time position will automatically appear on the Google Map. You can then share the URL of Track on the Map with your friends and they can follow your progress wherever you are in the world.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

SimCity Lausanne Transit on Google Maps

Vasile Cotovanu has created a new Google Map application, Lausanne Transit Network Simulator, using his popular and open-sourced transit network simulator. And I think it is the most impressive yet!

Vasile's latest simulation shows in real-time the public transit network of Lausanne in Switzerland. The simulator animates the town's buses in real-time. What makes this simulation even more impressive is the Google Maps aerial (Bird's Eye) imagery available in Lausanne.

The simulation maps the Lausanne public transit network and time-table, which involves more than 150km of travel and more than 300 stations, with 5,000 vehicles a day making almost 100,000 stops.

Using Vasile's vehicle-simulator you can create your own real-time public transit network simulator for any town or city with the help of the code, available from GitHub. To create your own simulated network you just need to plot your track / road network and the vehicle timetables in JSON format.

The network simulator can also be seen in action on:

• Swiss Railways(SBB) network simulator
• Romanian Railways(CFR) network simulator

Real-time Twitter Activity on Google Maps

Tweereal is a Google Map of Twitter users activity in real-time. The map displays an animation of the latest Tweets that contain geo-tags.

The Twitter messages are shown on the map by expanding coloured circles. It is possible to adjust the size and the opacity of the circles on the map. The map also includes slider controls that allow the user to control the length of the circle animation and the precision of their location.

Watch that Heat Map Grow & Glow

David Troy's awesome Twittervision map shows real-time Twitter messages on a Google Map.

Twittervision was one of the first non-transport related real-time maps and has been the inspiration for many other real-time animated maps. Twittervision now also includes another amazing innovation - a real-time heat map of photographs posted to Twitter.

If you switch off the 'tweets' layer you can view a heat map of real-time photos being posted on Twitter. The heat map actually appears and grows on the map in real-time. Very cool!


The New York Times' Tracking Taxi Flow is an excellent animated heat map that shows taxi pickups throughout the week in New York. The data comes from millions of taxi trips taken between January and March, 2009.

The biggest hot spot in New York in the mornings seems to be around Penn Station. Grand Central also seems to be a popular place to pickup taxis before work. Late at night the hotspots seem to be centred around Broadway, presumably as night goers are heading home.


Cooler Planet run a free service to help the public find green businesses and service providers in their area. Cooler Planet took all of the solar energy inquiries that they received over a number of years and produced an animated heat map, showing where those enquiries came from.

To animate the Solar Energy Enquiries Map select 'Time Lapse' and the map will add all the enquiries, quarter by quarter, from 2007 to 2009. Areas that have made the most enquiries appear in red on the map.

Romanian Trains Live on Google Maps

The Romanian railroad network is around 5,000 km in length, with almost 1,500 stations. Around 1,300 trains travel on the network every day making roughly 20,000 stops in total per day.

Using the Romanian Railways Network Simulator you can view it all live and in real-time. Romanian Railways Network Simulator uses the timetables of the Romanian railways to create a simulated real-time Google Map of the Romanian rail network. Using the map you can view the network's trains moving around Romania live on a Google Map.

You can create your own simulated vehicle simulator with the help of the code from Swisstrains, available from GitHub.

Vancouver's Buses Live on Google Maps

Vancouver's Next Bus has created a live real-time map of the city's bus network.

The Next Bus Google Map shows all the city's bus-stops with blue 'T' markers. If you click on a bus-stop marker you can view the scheduled times of the next bus due at the stop. However, as well as viewing the scheduled times of the next buses due, you can also see where the buses that service that route are in real-time on the map.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

Ship Tracking with Google Maps

Yesterday I revisited real-time tracking site Localiza Todo and I realised that they have added a lot of new cool features to their real-time map of ships and other vehicles.

Localiza Todo uses the Google Maps API to show in real-time the location of ships, planes, mobile phones and satellites. A really nice feature of the map is that you can select an individual vessel or a port and view an animation of its movements over the last 24 hours.

The map also features a Google Earth browser plugin view so it is also possible to track individual vehicles in 3D.

Google Maps of Food Trucks

Roaming Hunger has created a number of Google Maps to track the real-time locations of food trucks in a large number of U.S. cities.

The food trucks are mapped based on tweets by the truck owners and by published calendars. If you click on a food truck's map marker you can get details about the hours it will be present at the current location.

Also See

• truXmap - maps food trucks throughout the U.S.
• Tweat It - Google Map of food vendors in New York
• Food Truck Maps - Food trucks in LA

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Create a Simulated Vehicle Network

The awesome Swisstrains has open-sourced all the code you need to create your own animated vehicle simulator with Google Maps.

Swisstrains use the timetables of the Swiss Federal Railways to create a simulated real-time map of the Swiss rail network. Using the map you can view the network's trains moving around Switzerland live on a Google Map.

Now you can create your own simulated vehicle simulator with the help of the code, available from GitHub. To create your own simulated network you will also need to plot your track / road network and the vehicle timetables in JSON format.

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Create a Cool Mask Effect on Google Maps

Swiss Trains have open-sourced the code for a very cool masking effect on Google Maps.

The effect transforms a KML polygon into a mask that effectively highlights the polygon on the map by shading the rest of the world. You can see a demo of the effect on this Swiss Administrative Boundaries Map.

When you select a region on the Administrative Boundaries Map the chosen area is highlighted and the rest of the map shaded out.

The mask is a very effective tool. If you want to use the effect in your own Google Maps then grab the code from GitHub - Masked Polygons.

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Watch Live Broadcasts on Google Maps

One of my favourite smartphone apps is live broadcasting application Bambuser. The application lets you broadcast live video straight from you mobile phone or a webcam.

The only bugbear that I used to have with Bambuser is that it didn't have a map of broadcasts happening right now, so that users could select from the currently live broadcasts geographically. Well, now it does!

The live Bambuser Google Map shows the location of live broadcasts, those recorded in the last 24 hours and even older recorded broadcasts. You can even watch the live streams directly from the map.

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Fluglärmkonturenkarten on Google Maps

DFLD Radar is a Google Map of real-time air traffic over Europe.

There are quite a few live aircraft tracking maps already but DFLD Radar has a nice USP. DFLD Radar colour-codes the aeroplane map markers by altitude. The redder map markers indicate that the plane is flying at a lower altitude and the greener markers show planes flying at a higher altitude.

You can also click on any of the plane markers to read further details, such as the type of plane and vertical speed.


One consequence of all that aircraft traffic over Europe is quite a lot of noise pollution. Fluglärmkonturenkarten (you really do have to admire Germany's skill in eradicating those useless spaces that other languages insert between words) is a series of Google Maps showing noise pollution around Frankfurt Airport.



These heat maps show noise levels around the airport using data from 2007 and also show noise level predictions for 2020 in two different traffic modes.

Hat-tip: Bartalis

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Track Planes in Real-Time with Google Maps

Planefinder.net, the real-time plane tracking website, has made some very impressive updates to their Google Map.

Now as well as tracking thousands of planes in real-time around the world you can also play back a whole day's worth of flights. The playback option allows you to select a date, the number of hours you wish to view and even the speed of the animation. You really should zoom out on the USA, set the time to 23 hours and the speed to 120x and watch a day's worth of flights.

Another nice update in this new release of planefinder.net is the custom information windows. If you select an individual plane you can view a picture of the plane, the flight and flight details, download a KML of the flight path, zoom the map to fit the entire flight path and share the track on Twitter and Facebook.

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