Welcome to the code base for the data/API side of the Canberra Light Rail Tracker.

About

I live in the inner North in Canberra, ACT. We have a light rail network managed by our local goverment organisation, Transport Canberra. I was inspired to make this sign to help me catch the light rail without looking like a hot mess as I pegg it to the station or faff about at the stop for 15 minutes when I could be at home chilling. The beautiful light rail wizards at Transport Canberra decided to give out all of the vehicle location data to anyone freely (CC BY 4.0) to make cool stuff. I wanted a challenge so I went down this rabbit hole and here we are today. This repo contains all the data side of things for my API, https://data.cbr-transport.au. The API is used from my replica of the Transport Canberra stop signage in this github repo.

This API is a python rewrite of one I wrote using vlang. The reason for making this data API is I didn't want to overwhelm Transport Canberra with each user making requests for their data, so this is a mirror (of sorts).

There is no rate limiting or credentials required for this API. The default port is localhost:4050. Please fork it and run it yourself if you intend to do anything heavy (that way it won't impact the beautiful prople using my light rail tracker app.

The API

/live - Get anything active on the route.

E.g. https://data.cbr-transport.au/live returns:

[
  {
    "stop": "nlr",         // current target stop
    "dest": "alg",         // final destination
    "trip_id": "204",      // Transport Canberra trip id
    "seq": 4,              // how long along the route
    "status": "stopped_at" // status of the trip 
  },
  ...
]

/arrivals/<stop_idx> - Get any scheduled arrivals for this particular stop.

stop_idx is an int between 1 and 14 for each consecutive stop on the current Canberra Light Rail network. 1 is Gungahlin Place and 14 is Alinga Street.

E.g. https://data.cbr-transport.au/arrivals/14 is for all of the scheduled arrivals for Alinga Street and returns:

[
  {
    "Location": {
      "stop": "epc",            // current target stop
      "dest": "ggn",            // final destination
      "trip_id": "73",          // Transport Canberra trip id
      "seq": 8,                 // how long along the route
      "status": "in_transit_to" // status of the trip 
    },
    "time": 1708947000, // scheduled arrival time at this stop
    "time_min": 2.57    // minutes from now 
  },
  ...
]