Vehicle tracking enhancements

With this release, we’re bringing the digital and physical experience of tracking a bus or tram closer together!

From next week we will be releasing an update to Premium websites, apps and the myTrip app that will change how vehicle tracking looks on a map. Up until now, vehicles have been shown as a teardrop, pointing in the direction of travel.

Going forward, vehicles will be displayed as a vehicle-shaped icon that represents a view of the top-down perspective of a bus or tram. Buses are coloured to match the colour of the line they’re currently on.

As before, users will be able to tap on a vehicle to find out all about it, including the vehicle livery colours. By using the route colour on the vehicle icon itself, instead of the vehicle livery, it should make it easy for users to quickly match up the service on screen with the bus they are waiting for in the real world. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this to make sure that it’s working for users as much as we think it will.

A number of buses being tracked across Bournemouth

User Interface (UI) Accessibility

Making the new tracking icons easy to tap has been an important consideration in the accessibility of this update. To do this we dynamically alter their size as the user zooms in and out. Vehicles appear big when zoomed in, making it easy for users to find out more about the vehicle itself, and smaller when zoomed out to avoid overcrowding the map

The Explore view (Premium) showing vehicles at different zoom levels

A note on bearings

Some vehicles may not have bearing information in the AVL data feed, which tells us which way the vehicle is heading. This may be temporary or something that your feed provider does not support.

Where we do not receive this data in the AVL feed, we will continue to show the marker as circles. It may be possible in future for us to do some clever maths to calculate a likely direction for the vehicle, but given that this data is in scope for Bus Open Data it will be better to correct this data at the source if possible.

As always, if you have any questions at all you know where we are.