OVERWATCH.EARTH
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About

Live buses, metro and rail moving across the world's cities

Live on the globe now: 947 tracked

This layer plots individual transit vehicles — buses, metro trains, light rail and trams — as they move through cities around the world. Each dot is a real vehicle reporting its position right now, drawn from agency feeds that publish in the GTFS-Realtime standard. Spin the globe to a metro area and you'll see fleets in motion along their routes; click a vehicle to inspect its trip, route and last reported location.

The data comes from Transitland (transit.land), an open data platform that has aggregated public transit feeds since 2014. Rather than connecting to one city at a time, Transitland maintains a directory of operators and feeds spanning 2,500+ transit agencies across 55+ countries, normalizing each agency's GTFS-Realtime vehicle-position stream into one consistent format. That's what makes a single global map possible: the same dot means the same thing whether it's a bus in Boston or a tram in Berlin.

Coverage depends on what each agency chooses to publish, so density is highest where operators share live feeds and sparser elsewhere. Vehicles refresh as new positions arrive, typically every several seconds to a minute per feed. This is one of roughly 29 live layers you can solo or combine on the overwatch.earth globe — no account, no paywall.

Data source: Transitland

Where does the transit data come from?

From Transitland (transit.land), an open data platform that aggregates public transit feeds. It collects each agency's GTFS-Realtime vehicle-position stream and normalizes them into one format, so vehicles from many different cities appear consistently on the same map.

How many cities and agencies are covered?

Transitland maintains a directory spanning 2,500+ transit operators across 55+ countries. Whether a specific city shows live vehicles depends on whether its agency publishes a GTFS-Realtime feed, so coverage is dense in some regions and thin in others.

What kinds of vehicles does it show?

Any mode an agency reports through GTFS-Realtime — buses, metro and subway trains, light rail, trams and in some places ferries. Click a vehicle to see its route and trip details where the agency provides them.

How current is the position data?

Each vehicle reflects the latest position its agency has published. Feeds typically update every few seconds up to about a minute, so vehicles move in near real time rather than on a fixed schedule.