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Trip Planner Information Feed

Overview

Metro's Trip Planner web services provide Los Angeles transit riders with one of the most complete public transportation services in the United States.

Metro is releasing data as it is tested and ready; providing everything needed to build your own trip planning application. These applications may be built for any of a number of platforms including the web and mobile devices. 

Metro's Trip Planner web services will eventually include service advisory feeds plus all the data needed to build complex itineraries. 

 

Services and formats

We will begin by publishing data that describe Metro’s routes, schedules, and stops. The data are being published as web services designed to be consumed on an as-needed basis. These web services are designed not to be kept (as you might a schedule) but rather they should be consumed in real-time.

  • The web services API will return data in two popular formats: json and xml
  • Service includes data from 65 transit agencies in the Southland, including transfer information

 

More services will be added as they become available. These will include:

  • geocode -- get lat/long for intersections, addresses and landmarks
  • proximity -- get the distance between two points
  • shape -- get a coordinate list for a given route ID
  • walk -- get the walking distance between two locations within one mile of one another
  • fare -- get the total fare for an itinerary
  • timetable -- get a timetable for a given route ID
  • itinerary -- get completed itineraries for start and stop points
Itinerary is a complete application and it will be the last application to come online.

Mashups

Metro's Web services are a collection of resources that gives the public access the schedule and route information for every transportation services offered by Metro. Our services encourage the public to design custom applications (called "mashups") with other Web Services including Flickr, Google Maps, Yelp and Yahoo.

Here are a few applications that could be built using Metro's Web services:

  • A trip planner that knows a user's current location
  • Images of all the train and bus stations you will be using
  • Reviews for every restaurant within 1/3 mile of your destination

planning trip

User Contributed Notes

  • jpfeiffer
    jpfeiffer
    June 24, 2009

    I attribute this to Beta phase status: In my experience, the server calls take anywhere between 1s and 12s to complete, but more so on the far end. This is too long to provide a snappy user experience. In comparison, web server calls to TriMet's Web Services take no more than 1s in 95% of all cases (my estimate).

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  • pdxgeek
    pdxgeek
    Sept. 16, 2009

    It would be nice to get back some useful error information. I tried a couple calls using my API, and got no data back from the Schedule function. I then tried the Carrier function, and got some valid data back. Next I tried using the default 1-2-3-4-5 apikey (assuming it wouldn't work), and it failed the same way that the Schedule function failed with my apikey. So now I figure my Schedule call was somehow invalid, but don't know why. Knowing what failed is really important when making API calls and developing/debugging applications.

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