LA Metro tracking

Feature Requests
1

Hi! I am requesting for someone to build an app with LA Metro Rail arrival times. We bought our Tidbyt six months ago for the sole purpose of using it to track Metro and have been very sad that LA Metro is not supported by TidByt. Can someone build an LA Metro tracking app for Tidbyt? Every other major U.S. city is supported and there’s no reason LA can’t be.

Alternatively - if you’ve built a transit tracking app for another major transit system, can you give some advice on how to do it so I can do it myself?

2

Hey @Phoebekiekhofer , I had a quick look at the LA Metro site and I think I can put something together for you. Their data feed looks easy to work with.

Let me know if you’re still interested

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3

Yes i am still interested! Thank you!

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4

Great! I’ll get onto it over the weekend… I need a new project :grin:

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5

Hey @Phoebekiekhofer ,

Here’s a prototype of the app. It will show the end of the line both ways and next 2 services.

Let me know if you want it show anything specific

la_metro

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6

I’ve finished the app and submitted for approval. Hopefully it will be available soon :slightly_smiling_face:

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7

Any update on this? I’m excited for this too. Would love to have timetables for the A line

8

hey thank you so much!!! i thought that i had responded by email but it looks like my replies to you aren’t showing up, i’m so sorry for the delay.

thank you so much for doing this!!!

I was wondering if you could get arrival information for the E Line train? That’s the train near my house! Is it possible to add that on?

Thank you so much,
-Phoebe

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9

Its still pending review unfortunately. They are way behind on approvals at the moment

@Phoebekiekhofer , not a problem all the lines are included in the app :slightly_smiling_face:

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10

@Phoebekiekhofer and @MontyP thanks for the update! Keep us posted on when it’s approved. What you have in the example looks amazing! Thanks for taking the time to do this!

11

An update on this - looks like the arrival time data is no longer accessible unless you have an authorisation key. I’ll see what I can do but will likely have to abandon this project.

Sorry guys :cry:

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12

@MontyP oh no! So frustrating that this is so difficult. Keep us posted, but if it can’t be done at the moment we definitely understand. Thanks for keeping us posted and for your work on this!

13

@MontyP can you share the code or a repo you’ve worked on so far? I would be interested in pushing this over the line

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14

Hey @tal42levy , the problem is that the data is not publicly available on the LA Metro website anymore. The APIs require an authorisation key now, which wasn’t the case when I was developing the app. The app was working fine before they introduced this authorisation requirement

15

I understand. I want to try to update your code to use the api key now, so I can try to get it working for personal use. Happy to credit you for the base project and everything

16

Sure, if you have a key I can share it with you. Will send you a PM

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17

I’ve submitted an updated version of the app for approval here, set up to ask the user to request their own API key from bit.ly/slyapi

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18

@tal42levy Nice! Excited! Any updates on the new version?

19

Yes, it got published on Monday! You’ll need to request your own API key from Swiftly, but they issued me a key within 24 hours of filling out the form, and were able to enable more features quickly when I requested it. I’ve also set it up so you can include bus arrivals if you’d like to. You’ll want to request the key with the following specifics:

image
image692×956 66.8 KB

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20

@tal42levy Awesome! Thank you! Where in the Tidbyt store/app is it? And do you have the link to request this? I’ve never done anything like this before so pretty new to all of this