Real-Time Tracking via Google Maps

Track on the Map is a handy Google Maps based application that allows you to quickly and easily share your real-time movements with the world.

To use Track on the Map you just need to view the application with a GPS enabled device, such as your smart phone. You can add a user name and select an appropriate icon and that's all you have to do.

Once you agree to share your location with Track on the Map your real-time position will automatically appear on the Google Map. You can then share the URL of Track on the Map with your friends and they can follow your progress wherever you are in the world.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

SimCity Lausanne Transit on Google Maps

Vasile Cotovanu has created a new Google Map application, Lausanne Transit Network Simulator, using his popular and open-sourced transit network simulator. And I think it is the most impressive yet!

Vasile's latest simulation shows in real-time the public transit network of Lausanne in Switzerland. The simulator animates the town's buses in real-time. What makes this simulation even more impressive is the Google Maps aerial (Bird's Eye) imagery available in Lausanne.

The simulation maps the Lausanne public transit network and time-table, which involves more than 150km of travel and more than 300 stations, with 5,000 vehicles a day making almost 100,000 stops.

Using Vasile's vehicle-simulator you can create your own real-time public transit network simulator for any town or city with the help of the code, available from GitHub. To create your own simulated network you just need to plot your track / road network and the vehicle timetables in JSON format.

The network simulator can also be seen in action on:

• Swiss Railways(SBB) network simulator
• Romanian Railways(CFR) network simulator
  

Real-time Twitter Activity on Google Maps

Tweereal is a Google Map of Twitter users activity in real-time. The map displays an animation of the latest Tweets that contain geo-tags.

The Twitter messages are shown on the map by expanding coloured circles. It is possible to adjust the size and the opacity of the circles on the map. The map also includes slider controls that allow the user to control the length of the circle animation and the precision of their location.

Watch that Heat Map Grow & Glow

David Troy's awesome Twittervision map shows real-time Twitter messages on a Google Map.

Twittervision was one of the first non-transport related real-time maps and has been the inspiration for many other real-time animated maps. Twittervision now also includes another amazing innovation - a real-time heat map of photographs posted to Twitter.

If you switch off the 'tweets' layer you can view a heat map of real-time photos being posted on Twitter. The heat map actually appears and grows on the map in real-time. Very cool!


The New York Times' Tracking Taxi Flow is an excellent animated heat map that shows taxi pickups throughout the week in New York. The data comes from millions of taxi trips taken between January and March, 2009.

The biggest hot spot in New York in the mornings seems to be around Penn Station. Grand Central also seems to be a popular place to pickup taxis before work. Late at night the hotspots seem to be centred around Broadway, presumably as night goers are heading home.


Cooler Planet run a free service to help the public find green businesses and service providers in their area. Cooler Planet took all of the solar energy inquiries that they received over a number of years and produced an animated heat map, showing where those enquiries came from.

To animate the Solar Energy Enquiries Map select 'Time Lapse' and the map will add all the enquiries, quarter by quarter, from 2007 to 2009. Areas that have made the most enquiries appear in red on the map.

Romanian Trains Live on Google Maps

The Romanian railroad network is around 5,000 km in length, with almost 1,500 stations. Around 1,300 trains travel on the network every day making roughly 20,000 stops in total per day.

Using the Romanian Railways Network Simulator you can view it all live and in real-time. Romanian Railways Network Simulator uses the timetables of the Romanian railways to create a simulated real-time Google Map of the Romanian rail network. Using the map you can view the network's trains moving around Romania live on a Google Map.

You can create your own simulated vehicle simulator with the help of the code from Swisstrains, available from GitHub.

Vancouver's Buses Live on Google Maps

Vancouver's Next Bus has created a live real-time map of the city's bus network.

The Next Bus Google Map shows all the city's bus-stops with blue 'T' markers. If you click on a bus-stop marker you can view the scheduled times of the next bus due at the stop. However, as well as viewing the scheduled times of the next buses due, you can also see where the buses that service that route are in real-time on the map.

Hat-tip: Street View Funny

Ship Tracking with Google Maps

Yesterday I revisited real-time tracking site Localiza Todo and I realised that they have added a lot of new cool features to their real-time map of ships and other vehicles.

Localiza Todo uses the Google Maps API to show in real-time the location of ships, planes, mobile phones and satellites. A really nice feature of the map is that you can select an individual vessel or a port and view an animation of its movements over the last 24 hours.

The map also features a Google Earth browser plugin view so it is also possible to track individual vehicles in 3D.

Google Maps of Food Trucks

Roaming Hunger has created a number of Google Maps to track the real-time locations of food trucks in a large number of U.S. cities.

The food trucks are mapped based on tweets by the truck owners and by published calendars. If you click on a food truck's map marker you can get details about the hours it will be present at the current location.

Also See

• truXmap - maps food trucks throughout the U.S.
• Tweat It - Google Map of food vendors in New York
• Food Truck Maps - Food trucks in LA

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Create a Simulated Vehicle Network

The awesome Swisstrains has open-sourced all the code you need to create your own animated vehicle simulator with Google Maps.

Swisstrains use the timetables of the Swiss Federal Railways to create a simulated real-time map of the Swiss rail network. Using the map you can view the network's trains moving around Switzerland live on a Google Map.

Now you can create your own simulated vehicle simulator with the help of the code, available from GitHub. To create your own simulated network you will also need to plot your track / road network and the vehicle timetables in JSON format.

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Create a Cool Mask Effect on Google Maps

Swiss Trains have open-sourced the code for a very cool masking effect on Google Maps.

The effect transforms a KML polygon into a mask that effectively highlights the polygon on the map by shading the rest of the world. You can see a demo of the effect on this Swiss Administrative Boundaries Map.

When you select a region on the Administrative Boundaries Map the chosen area is highlighted and the rest of the map shaded out.

The mask is a very effective tool. If you want to use the effect in your own Google Maps then grab the code from GitHub - Masked Polygons.

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Watch Live Broadcasts on Google Maps

One of my favourite smartphone apps is live broadcasting application Bambuser. The application lets you broadcast live video straight from you mobile phone or a webcam.

The only bugbear that I used to have with Bambuser is that it didn't have a map of broadcasts happening right now, so that users could select from the currently live broadcasts geographically. Well, now it does!

The live Bambuser Google Map shows the location of live broadcasts, those recorded in the last 24 hours and even older recorded broadcasts. You can even watch the live streams directly from the map.

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Fluglärmkonturenkarten on Google Maps

DFLD Radar is a Google Map of real-time air traffic over Europe.

There are quite a few live aircraft tracking maps already but DFLD Radar has a nice USP. DFLD Radar colour-codes the aeroplane map markers by altitude. The redder map markers indicate that the plane is flying at a lower altitude and the greener markers show planes flying at a higher altitude.

You can also click on any of the plane markers to read further details, such as the type of plane and vertical speed.


One consequence of all that aircraft traffic over Europe is quite a lot of noise pollution. Fluglärmkonturenkarten (you really do have to admire Germany's skill in eradicating those useless spaces that other languages insert between words) is a series of Google Maps showing noise pollution around Frankfurt Airport.



These heat maps show noise levels around the airport using data from 2007 and also show noise level predictions for 2020 in two different traffic modes.

Hat-tip: Bartalis

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Track Planes in Real-Time with Google Maps

Planefinder.net, the real-time plane tracking website, has made some very impressive updates to their Google Map.

Now as well as tracking thousands of planes in real-time around the world you can also play back a whole day's worth of flights. The playback option allows you to select a date, the number of hours you wish to view and even the speed of the animation. You really should zoom out on the USA, set the time to 23 hours and the speed to 120x and watch a day's worth of flights.

Another nice update in this new release of planefinder.net is the custom information windows. If you select an individual plane you can view a picture of the plane, the flight and flight details, download a KML of the flight path, zoom the map to fit the entire flight path and share the track on Twitter and Facebook.

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Track and View the ISS with Google Maps

The Universidad Complutense de Madrid has created an ISS Real-Time Map to track in real-time the position of the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth.

The map shows in real-time the position of the ISS with a red polyline showing the station's path for the current day. The university has also created an OpenStreetMap that shows the future paths and times of the space station over Spain.

Astro Viewer also provide a real-time Google Map of the ISS. Astro Viewer not only allows you to view the current position of the ISS but also allows you to view a list of the next sighting opportunities for your location, with a visibility indicator that predicts the brightness of the ISS on its pass.



If you are keen to view the International Space Station with your own eyes then SightSpaceStation is a great guide to where you should look in the sky. SightSpaceStation allows you to view a Google Map of the location of lots of satellites.

The application includes a Street View option that allows the user to view a chosen satellite superimposed on top of Google's Street View imagery. This is really useful as it shows the direction and the elevation of the satellite as it passes overhead.

Using SightSpaceStation you can find out exactly where you should be looking to view the ISS as it passes overhead.

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Follow Penguin Happy Feet on Google Maps

In June of this year an Emperor Penguin, who was soon named Happy Feet, was found on Peka Peka Beach in New Zealand. The penguin had ventured about 2000 km north of his normal habitat in the Antarctic.

During his stay in New Zealand Happy Feet was cared for by Wellington Zoo. Now, however, he has been released back into the wild. He has also been fitted with a Sirtrack KiwiSat 202 Satellite Transmitter.

Thanks to Sirtrack you can now follow Happy Feet live on a Google Map as he undertakes his long journey home.

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Hungarian Trains Live on Google Maps

Hungarian railways MAV could be the first rail company to launch their own real-time Google Map showing the live position of passenger trains.

A number of individuals have created real-time maps of moving trains by scraping train data from operators' websites and some train operators have even released their own APIs. However MÁV-START Vonatinfo is, I think, the first live Google Map of trains actually released by a train operator themselves.

The map shows the live real-time positions of all trains on the Hungarian rail network. You can click on any of the trains to view its full timetable. The trains themselves are colour-coded to indicate if they are currently running on time or are delayed.

If you select 'Vonat' you can search for an individual train. Enter a train number and the train's timetable is displayed and the map zooms to the selected train's track. If you select 'Állomás' you can search for and view an individual station's timetable.

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Tracking with Street View

Google Maps APRS is a Google Map displaying real-time information collected from the Automatic Position Reporting System Internet network (APRS-IS). APRS is used by amateur (ham) radio operators to transmit real-time position information, weather data, telemetry and messages over the radio.



A vehicle equipped with a GPS receiver, a VHF transmitter or HF transceiver and a tracker can transmit its location, speed and course. Using this Google Map it is possible to search for any vehicle using its APRS call sign.



Google Maps APRS was first featured on Google Maps Mania back in 2009, since when it has added a cool Street View option. If a road vehicle is transmitting its location with APRS you can now use the 'track in Street View' option to get a virtual first-hand view as seen from the vehicle.



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A Real-Time Map of the World's Joggers

Sports Tracker is a free sports tracking app for Android, iPhone and Nokia Symbian devices.



The app maps your runs or bike rides and collects data on your speed, distance, step-count, elevation and times. As well as using Google Maps in the app the Sports Tracker website also features a smart real-time map of sports enthusiasts who have most recently used the app.



It is even possible to click on the individual users and view the track they recorded on a separate map alongside all the data they collected on their run or bike ride.



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Create a Real-Time Flickr Google Map

.net magazine has published a great tutorial on how to create a real-time animated Flickr map. The tutorial was written by James Christian and Ben Gannaway the creators of the excellent Net-a-Porter Live Google Map.

The tutorial explains how to create a Google Map that animates in near real-time through images posted on Flickr. The tutorial includes how to work with the Flickr API and how to customise the look of your map.

Alongside the tutorial is a demo map and a link to download the full source code.

Integrate Google Maps and Flickr into a Real-Time App

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Boston's Buses Live on Google Maps

With TransitSpy you can follow Boston's MBTA buses live on Google Maps.

Using the sidebar you can select any combination of MBTA bus routes and view in real-time the position of the buses on those routes. As well as the live buses all the stops on a route are displayed on the map. If you click on a bus-stop's map marker you can see how long you will have to wait until the next bus arrives.

TransitSpy MBTA

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