Skip to content

tbarmann/ripta-api

BranchesTags

Repository files navigation

RIPTA API

Provides static and near real-time bus information for the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA).

It has two main purposes:

  1. To provide a proxy to the official Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) API (http://realtime.ripta.com:81/api/), which supplies near real-time information about bus locations and expected arrival times. Beyond the official API, this API adds the ability to filter the results by route and direction. See the RIPTA API documentation for more information on the RIPTA provided endpoints: http://realtime.ripta.com:81/

  2. To provide static information about bus routes, stops and schedules not available in the official RIPTA API. This data comes from static files provided by RIPTA that are imported into a database and are accessed by endpoints.

You can use this API to:

  • Get delay information of any bus currently running
  • Get bus location of any bus currently running
  • Get stops closest to a particular lat/lon point
  • Get all trips associated with a particular route
  • Get all stops associated with a particular route
  • Get all stops associated with a particular trip
  • Get all trips associated with a particular stop

Most of these API requests can be filtered by trip direction, service day, start time and end time.

The schedule and trip data come from static files provided by RIPTA at https://www.ripta.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/0/3cda81dfa140edbe9aae214b26245b4a/files/google_transit.zip. Note: this URL has changed in the past and may change again. The most current file may be linked from https://www.ripta.com/mobile-applications. These files are updated each time RIPTA changes its schedules, which recently has been every four months.

This app includes a bash script to automatically download the static files and import them into a Postgres database.

Local Installation

To install on a local machine, you need to have Postgres installed and running on your system or server. From the Postgres command line, create a new database called ripta. The tables can be created and seeded automatically when running the seed.sh bash script. Tables are created with the sql commands found in the static/google_transit/seed.sql file.

Set environmental variable: DATABASE_URL, which is the connection string to connect to the ripta database you created. Replace DBuser, password and DBHost as appropriate to your setup. Also set RIPTA_DATA_URL, the url to the static zip file provided by RIPTA. The current URL is shown in the example:

$ export DATABASE_URL=postgres://DBuser:password@DBHost/ripta
$ export RIPTA_DATA_URL=https://www.ripta.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/0/3cda81dfa140edbe9aae214b26245b4a/files/google_transit.zip
$ npm install (or $ yarn)
$ ./seed.sh
$ node index.js

Heroku installation

You will need to provision Postgres as an add-on with at least the hobby-basic tier. (Unfortunately, the free hobby-dev tier is limited to 10,000 rows, which is too small to hold the static data files.)

See https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git#prerequisites-installing-git-and-the-heroku-cli

  1. Use heroku create to create a new empty application on Heroku
  2. Run git push heroku master or git push heroku a-different-branch:master if deploying another branch
  3. Set RIPTA_DATA_URL in dashboard. DATABASE_URL should have been added automatically when provisioning postgres in Heroku.
  4. Set TZ environmental variable in the dashboard to America/New_York. This sets the timezone in Node to match the timezone the data is intended for.
  5. Open a bash connection: $ heroku run bash and seed the database:
$ ./seed.sh

API Endpoints

GET /api/stops

Find closest stops to a particular location, given latitude and longitude

Params

  • lat (required) - latitude
  • lon (required) - longitude
  • limit - number of results

Example:

api/stops?lat=41.827360&lon=-71.400569&limit=2`

Response:

[
  {
  stop: {
    stop_id: 16905,
    stop_code: "",
    stop_name: "TUNNEL BEFORE THAYER",
    stop_desc: "",
    stop_lat: 41.827608,
    stop_lon: -71.400864,
    zone_id: "",
    stop_url: "",
    location_type: 0,
    parent_station: "",
    stop_associated_place: "tuth"
  },
  distance: 0.02291043943578053
  },
  {
  stop: {
    stop_id: 17045,
    stop_code: "",
    stop_name: "TUNNEL AFTER THAYER",
    stop_desc: "",
    stop_lat: 41.827682,
    stop_lon: -71.400886,
    zone_id: "",
    stop_url: "",
    location_type: 0,
    parent_station: "",
    stop_associated_place: "tuth"
  },
  distance: 0.027608130521622528
  }
]

GET /api/trips/route/:routeId

Returns all bus trips on a particular route. Can be filtered by direction (inbound or outbound), time of day, and stop.

Params

  • routeID (required)
  • stopId - defaults to first stop
  • serviceDay: Date in the form of YYYYMMDD - default is today
  • directionId: 0 | 1 - default is both - 0 is inbound, 1 is outbound
  • startTime: HH:MM - default is all day
  • endTime: HH:MM - default is all day

Example:

api/trips/route/60/?serviceDay=20181121&startTime=17:00&endTime=18:00?directionId=0

Response:

[
  {
  trip_id: 2580332,
  trip_headsign: "PROVIDENCE via EAST MAIN",
  departure_time: "17:00:00",
  stop_name: "GATEWAY CENTER AT 60 BUS BERTH",
  direction_id: 0
  },
  {
  trip_id: 2591409,
  trip_headsign: "PROVIDENCE via WEST MAIN",
  departure_time: "17:15:00",
  stop_name: "GATEWAY CENTER AT 60 BUS BERTH",
  direction_id: 0
  },
...
]

GET /api/stops/:routeId

Returns all stops on a particular route. Can be filtered by direction (inbound or outbound), and serviceDay.

Params

  • routeID (required)
  • serviceDay: Date in the form of YYYYMMDD - default is today
  • directionId: 0 | 1 - default is both - 0 is inbound, 1 is outbound

Note that if a directionId is not specified, the response will appear to have duplicate stops. In fact, the stops with the same names are different stops: one is for one direction and the other is for the opposite direction. Often they are across the street from each other but share the same name.

Also note that not all trips contain every stop in this response. This returns all stops on all trips.

Example:

api/stops/60?directionId=0&serviceDay=20181121

Response:

{
  routeId: "60",
  stops: [
    {
      stop_id: 8530,
      stop_name: "BARRINGTON PARK&RIDE (WHITE CHURCH)"
    },
    {
    stop_id: 2760,
    stop_name: "BAYVIEW APARTMENTS"
    },
    ...
  ]
}

GET /api/trips/stop/:stopId

Returns all bus trips for a particular stop. Can be filtered by direction (inbound or outbound), time of day, and route.

Params

  • stopID (required)
  • routeId
  • serviceDay: Date in the form of YYYYMMDD - default is today
  • directionId: 0 | 1 - default is both - 0 is inbound, 1 is outbound
  • startTime: HH:MM - default is all day
  • endTime: HH:MM - default is all day

Example:

api/trips/stop/8530?&startTime=17:00&endTime=18:00?directionId=0

Response:

{
  "stopId": "8530",
  "trips": [
    {
      "trip_id": 2764503,
      "service_id": "hsem1801-Weekday-1-SE2018-1111100",
      "arrival_time": "17:04:00",
      "departure_time": "17:04:00",
      "stop_name": "BARRINGTON PARK&RIDE (WHITE CHURCH)",
      "route_id": 60,
      "trip_headsign": "PROVIDENCE via EAST MAIN"
    },
    {
      "trip_id": 2764465,
      "service_id": "hsem1801-Weekday-1-SE2018-1111100",
      "arrival_time": "17:19:00",
      "departure_time": "17:19:00",
      "stop_name": "BARRINGTON PARK&RIDE (WHITE CHURCH)",
      "route_id": 60,
      "trip_headsign": "PROVIDENCE via WEST MAIN"
    },
    ...
}

GET /api/trip/:tripId

Get all stops, along with arrival and departure times on a particular trip.

Params

  • :tripId (required)

Example:

/api/trip/2591429

Response:

{
  tripId: "2591429",
  stops: [{
    stop_id: 72165,
    stop_name: "KENNEDY PLAZA (STOP Y)",
    departure_time: "16:45:00",
    arrival_time: "16:45:00",
    stop_sequence: 1
  },
  {
    stop_id: 16530,
    stop_name: "MEMORIAL FS WESTMINSTER",
    departure_time: "16:45:00",
    arrival_time: "16:45:00",
    stop_sequence: 2
  },
  {
    stop_id: 16310,
    stop_name: "S WATER FS CRAWFORD",
    departure_time: "16:45:00",
    arrival_time: "16:45:00",
    stop_sequence: 3
  }
  ...
  ]
}

GET /api/:type/route/:route/:dir?

Get live updates on buses filtered by route and direction.

Params:

  • :type (required) - 'tripupdates' | 'vehiclepositions' | 'servicealerts'
  • :route (required) RIPTA bus route number
  • :dir - 'inbound' | 'outbound'

Example:

/api/tripupdates/route/60/inbound

Response:

{
header: {
  gtfs_realtime_version: "1",
  incrementality: 0,
  timestamp: 1508265064
},
entity: [
  {
    id: "2",
    is_deleted: false,
    trip_update: {
      trip: {
        trip_id: "2580389",
        start_time: "13:00:00",
        start_date: "20171017",
        schedule_relationship: 0,
        route_id: "60"
      },
      stop_time_update: [ ],
      vehicle: {
        id: "924",
        label: "924",
        license_plate: " "
      },
      timestamp: 1508265053
    },
    vehicle: null,
    alert: null
  },
  ...
  ]
}

Copyright © 2016-2019 by Timothy C. Barmann

About

No description, website, or topics provided.

Resources

Readme
Activity

Stars

7 stars

Watchers

6 watching

Forks

3 forks
Report repository

Releases

No releases published

Packages

No packages published

Contributors 3

  •  
  •  
  •  

Languages