RTPI backend system to be updated

The GTFS-R endpoint has been up and down a lot over the past few days. Some days it's been gone for 2hrs or longer. I've tried emailing the NTA numerous times but can't get a response from anyone. Here are some uptime stats so you can see how bad it is.

Does anyone here have any contacts in the NTA? The outages are still ongoing and I can't elicit a response from anyone in the organisation through any of the contacts that I had previously used before.

Got a GoAhead bus the other day (first bus I've got in 2 years) and despite the TFI app showing "realtime" for the service, it was showing as being 10 minutes up the road from where it really was. As a result when it didn't show at my stop and disappeared off the app, I assumed it wasn't running and wandered off to another stop to get a different route. Only then did the first bus show up and I had to sprint back to get on it.

How does this happen - either the bus is being tracked in which case the system knows where it is; or it isn't in which case it usually shows the timetabled departures but shouldn't display "realtime" on the app (I checked Next Bus Dublin as well and it was showing the same incorrect info).

What's really frustrating is that the NTA still haven't made the physical location available in their GTFS-R data. It's only available in their proprietary app that uses their own private API. I would love to be able to show this data in the Next Bus app as it's much more helpful than an often-wrong time estimate.

It’s a handy tool and one they don’t push too much.

It generally works, and once you know where the bus is you can decide what to do.

You do need to zoom in a little and give them a moment longer to load.

In my own case my main bus route can frequently get stuck in traffic immediately having left the terminus and prior to a certain point, and thereby means that the predictive times might be unreliable due to varying traffic conditions.

But if I watch the bus on the map, I can wait until it has passed a point on the route from where it tends to move freely and still allow me time to get to the stop.

The issue you experienced is that the GPS was not linking to the predictive stop-to-stop running times and hence was displaying the scheduled running times. Now as to why that was happening, I’ve no idea, but it happens to both operators every so often, and more than it should lately.

I was waiting for a GoAhead service last week. It disappeared from the app and never came. The return service then showed up on the app with 'trip cancelled' in red letters. Previously I asked GoAhead about this feature and they said this would be happening for 'operational reasons', whatever that means.

That’s the issue that I mentioned above where the predictive stop-by-stop schedule isn’t linking to the bus GPS and it just defaults to the schedule.

It has been happening far too often of late.

Email sent out to developers registered with NTAs GTFS API today, with some (I imagine highly requested) features being added.

Some other stuff mentioned:

According to the email, the general release is planned to be delivered 3rd quarter 2022, with the UAT links made available within the next 2-3 weeks. The UAT will be pointed to a test environment, so no live updates.

Edit: Here's a more in depth article on the changes -

In my experience, the TFI app shows phantom buses that the bus stop displays have filtered out, very frustrating.

Select the map on the TFI real time app and click on the three vertical dots and there’s an option to show live vehicle positions.

You do need to zoom in a bit to see them and they load after the stops.

The same applies to the map on the real time section of the TFI Journey Planner app.

They are clearer to see on the Real Time app.

So this is more to do with the Dublin Bus API, but I noticed today that the VehicleRef field is now being populated again! Been broken for I'd say at least a year at this stage.

Nevermind, the launch has been postponed