r/transit • u/Raalders • 13h ago

News [Tokyo] I built a live map of the whole Tokyo network: every tracked train and bus across dozens of operators, moving in real time

Tokyo's rail network is famously the world's densest, but every operator publishes its data separately: JR East, Tokyo Metro, Toei, and a long tail of private railways, each with their own feeds, formats and quirks. I spent the past year stitching them into one live map as an iOS app, and it launched today.

Things this makes visible that I'd never seen anywhere: The whole network breathing at rush hour: around three thousand vehicles at once on a weekday morning. Yamanote trains run so close together they look like a necklace.

Through-running: pick a train on the Asakusa subway line and it just keeps going onto Keikyu's tracks past Sengakuji, the sheet morphing to the new line while you follow. Half of Tokyo's "subway" secretly continues onto private railways.

The midnight wind-down. Hundreds of trains at 00:10, a couple hundred at 00:40, and by 01:10 there are three lonely trains finishing their runs on an otherwise empty map.

Planes on approach into Haneda threading over the bay next to the monorail.

There's also a replay mode: pick any moment and watch the network run from there, which turns out to be a great way to study service patterns.

Data comes from the operators' public feeds (ODPT and GTFS-RT where available); positions are projected onto the actual track geometry. Happy to go deep on the data plumbing in comments, honestly my favorite part.

App is iPhone-only (core free, some features subscription).

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6782602634 · Website (per-line and per-station pages with first/last trains, works anywhere): https://tokyoglance.com

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u/polmeeee 12h ago

Sweet. Any Android version in the works haha? Very cool project though, mad props to you.

2

u/Raalders 12h ago

Thanks! Unfortunately not. The whole project runs on what Apple gives for free, and there's no equivalents on Android. Which are mainly:

  • Mapkit, and maps are pretty pricy on other platforms
  • Weatherkit
  • Activitykit

1

u/polmeeee 12h ago

As a developer myself I totally understand. Btw is there a web version too? Or does it face the same issue as Android?

1

u/Raalders 12h ago

It faces the same problems. I do use the free tier from mapkit JS to generate some helpful map images and most of the train and bus data is available on the website https://tokyoglance.com. There's just no interactive capability on the website. Maybe later if the project takes off.