Live Subway

Live Subway is a project to provide real-time visualization of the NYC subways, using real-time MTA data feeds, written with Flask and Mapbox GL JS.

Environment Setup

1. Obtain API keys from the MTA and Mapbox GL JS.

2. Download the following zip files and extract:

   • protoc-[version]-[OS].zip from the list of latest Protobuf releases
   • google_transit.zip from the MTA's static subway schedule data

3. move protoc binary into your $PATH

4. Download the following proto files:

   • Google GTFS Realtime Proto
   • MTA Subway Proto (remove the .txt extension)

5. run the following commands in your terminal:

   protoc --python_out=[WORKING_DIRECTORY] gtfs-realtime.proto
   protoc --python_out=[WORKING_DIRECTORY] nyct-subway.proto
   

6. create API_KEYS.py and add the following lines:

   mta_key = '[MTA key]'
   mapbox_key = '[Mapbox GL JS key]'

7. create a static_transit directory in your root directory and add the static .txt files

8. run python scripts/static.py -goap if needed to generate files containing useful static transit data

9. run python app.py and point browser to localhost:5000 to test success