For bus operators
Bus operators and transport authorities: live positions, 3D streets and honest counts.
Play this tour or play it in presenter mode (no site header, 20 px captions, the tour loops, and 90 seconds without input starts it again from the first stop). Space pauses and resumes, Page Down and Page Up step, Esc ends the tour. The tour finishes on MapMap for transit.
For a stand or a shared screen, the kiosk link is /globe?tour=public&present=1: the public tour in presenter mode. present=1 on its own is the plain globe without the site chrome, with no tour.
Each stop waits for its layers (at most 6 seconds) before its caption shows. A stop whose live feed is quiet or stale shows its fallback line for 3 seconds and moves on, so check the stops marked below before you present.
| Stop | Depends on | Time | If quiet |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. London buses | Live buses, Live traffic | 9 s | May be skipped |
| 2. Brighton in 3D | Live buses | 9 s | May be skipped |
| 3. Follow a bus | Live buses | 9 s | May be skipped |
| 4. The honest count | Live buses | 9 s | May be skipped |
1. London buses
Caption: London's buses live, as operators report them, eased between reports.
If the feed is quiet: London's bus feed is quiet right now, so this stop is skipped.
- Positions as bus operators report them, usually every one to two minutes, eased between reports.
- TransitVehiclesLayer in @mapmap/maps polls GET /v1/transit/vehicles and animates the positions.
- From the DfT Bus Open Data Service, Open Government Licence v3.0, credited on the map.
2. Brighton in 3D
Caption: Brighton's buses as 3D double-deckers on a tilted street map.
If the feed is quiet: Brighton's bus feed is quiet right now, so this stop is skipped.
- Positions as bus operators report them, usually every one to two minutes, eased between reports.
- The 3D double-deckers are demo code on this page; the 2D layer is in the SDK.
- Tilt and rotation unlock from street zoom; the globe stays north-up further out.
3. Follow a bus
Caption: Following one Brighton bus: the camera glides between its reports.
If the feed is quiet: No Brighton bus is reporting right now, so this stop is skipped.
- The camera picks the bus nearest the centre once the first positions arrive.
- Between reports the bus is eased along, not predicted: no arrival times are claimed.
- Any bus on the map can be followed from its popup.
4. The honest count
Caption: The panel counts only the buses drawn in view after the latest report.
If the feed is quiet: London's bus feed is quiet right now, so this stop is skipped.
- Every answer carries a feed status, ok or stale; a stale feed still returns its last positions.
- The freshness pill under the buses row shows the feed's age as it ages.
- Buses show from town zoom, in England only; rail, tram and ferry are not included.
Aircraft
The Aircraft row (off by default, planes=1 in a link) shows civil aircraft of known type from adsb.lol, a community ADS-B network, under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. The globe reads one small file that MapMap's server rewrites every half minute from adsb.lol's public API; each aircraft's position is refreshed every few minutes, carried forward from its speed and heading, and eased to the new report, so it is shown as a model moving smoothly, not as real time.
- Only civil aircraft whose type adsb.lol knows are included, and only where adsb.lol has receivers: there is no coverage over most oceans.
- Airline flights show their callsign and type. Every other aircraft, including private and business aircraft and helicopters, is shown without identity: the file does not carry a registration, an airframe code or a callsign for them, so the page cannot show one.
- Never shown: military aircraft, aircraft sending an emergency code, aircraft on the FAA's privacy list, aircraft adsb.lol marks as of special interest, and aircraft on the ground. No history, no routes, no origin or destination.
- The file is a filtered extract of adsb.lol's data and is declared ODbL itself; nothing of MapMap's is mixed into it, and only the latest file is kept.
- Removal requests: hello@mapmap.ai.
Lightning
The Lightning row (off by default, lightning=1 in a link) shows every flash the Geostationary Lightning Mappers on NOAA's GOES-19 (GOES-East) and GOES-18 (GOES-West) satellites saw in the last minute. Each satellite publishes one file every 20 seconds on NOAA's Open Data Dissemination programme, about 10 to 15 seconds after it closes; MapMap's server reads each new file, keeps the last 5 minutes, and the globe replays the flashes at their real millisecond timing about 40 seconds behind real time. That is the last minute, not now.
- Coverage is the outline on the map: the Americas, the Atlantic and the East Pacific, about 52 degrees north to 52 degrees south. Europe, Africa and Asia are seen by other satellites, so an empty sky there means no data, not no storms.
- Both satellites see the band between about 127 and 85 degrees west. Each flash is kept from one of them only, split at 106.1 degrees west, so nothing is counted twice. A fixed spot that repeats in one pixel with no storm round it is not lightning and is dropped.
- Positions are rounded to 0.01 degrees (about a kilometre; a GLM pixel is about 8 to 14 km across). A flash's size on the map follows its radiant energy.
- Lightning: NOAA GOES-19/18 GLM, processed by MapMap. NOAA data disseminated through NODD are open to the public and can be used as desired; no endorsement by NOAA is stated or implied. Nothing older than 5 minutes is kept.