9 May 2023 by David Mountain

Reading RailAir operate luxury coach routes connecting Heathrow Airport to major rail stations in Reading, Guildford and Woking. This encourages people catching flights to lower their carbon footprint by choosing public transport for their inbound and onward travel.

Reliable real time information is key to building trust in public transport, and for no group of people is this more true than those with a flight to catch. Whilst schedules, and predicted departure and arrival times at stops, are essential foundations, showing the live location of buses traversing the network adds real world context. This helps people understand where their bus actually is, build confidence if its progress shows that it will arrive at their stop on time, and make better decisions if they can see it will not.

TransportAPI have collaborated with Reading RailAir to develop the Track My Coach screen on the RailAir website. TransportAPI receive the live bus locations, match them to scheduled journeys and push updates to the Track My Coach screen, to give a live view of all buses traversing a particular journey, in a particular direction.

This feature builds on TransportAPI’s ability to show the location of Buses On A Map anywhere in mainland Britain as described here. TransportAPI can switch sources of schedules or live locations as required, and use the best source of geometry available for every bus service.

Get in touch if you’d like to find out about how such a feature could be added to your website using TAPI’s Bus Information Managed Service. If you are a developer, check out our Usage Examples that describe how to show buses on a map and the geometry for a particular bus journey or the entire service as a backdrop.