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OneBusAway and OneBusAway NYC

fruminator edited this page Sep 26, 2012 · 5 revisions

Many people have asked about the difference between OneBusAway and OneBusAway-NYC. This page attempts to explain what's going on. It is still undergoing its first draft.

The History

As we all know, OneBusAway has its origins as an awesome project in the Seattle/Puget Sound region managed by the University of Washington. For more details on that project, see onebusaway.org. Critically, OneBusAway was/is released under an open source license.

When the MTA (of New York) began its real-time bus tracking and customer information system initiative, now called "MTA Bus Time," it chose to have the server side of this project implemented as an extension to OneBusAway. This resulted in the project referred to as OneBusAway-NYC.

What OneBusAway-NYC Is and Is Not

  • Architecture and Algorithms to receive raw data from buses, make sense of it, and feed it into the OneBusAway core.
  • New user interfaces and standards-based developer API's which pull data from the OneBusAway core.
  • Other administrative and supportive functions to manage data, both real-time (and archived real-time) and schedule/baseline data provided by the transit agency
  • Real-time hot/swapping of transit data bundles to support live schedule changeovers
  • Many other things as well.

The new modules are collectively described, for now, as "OneBusAway-NYC". They can be found at https://github.com/camsys/onebusaway-nyc/

The Relationship Between the Two Projects

At a Software Level

At a Project Management/Governance Level

What's Happening Next