I have been working hard to release the work that I have been doing to expose some of the more interesting real time data about chicago transit. Currently it is very bus-centric, but that is hopefully changing.

The genesis for this API is some work I did awhile ago reverse engineering the CTA Bus Tracker mashup. I was able to expose the endpoints that powered their google maps mashup. In its original state - you can get some pretty awesome functionality and data. I am attempting to clean it up and make it more robust.

The native endpoints thus far are:

I also did some work to push the UPOC alerts from the CTA riders community into a usable form. That endpoint is the first of hopefully many that can be used to grab real time information about the CTA. You can access it at:

Moving forward with the API, I want to do a couple key things. The first is to return JSON instead of that terrible XML. The second is to create a couple endpoints that will help with finding the right bus at the right location. I am always looking for help with this stuff - so if you have any ideas - please let me know in the comments.

So far, there are not a whole lot of applications using this API. The only ones I have thus far are:

All of this API work wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Dylan Richard, Dan X O’Neil and Kevin Zolkiewicz. The CTA has also been amazingly cool with all of this - I really like those guys.