About

Halifax Buses provides real-time information for Halifax Transit. Data comes from the live GTFS feed provided by Halifax Transit. Halifax Buses offers the following handy features:

Live fleet table - current status of every active vehicle, updated every 20s
Live Route list - list of every route, its current status, and related alerts.
Live departure board - upcoming departures from the requested stop(s), updated up to every 15s
Live map - current position and status for every active vehicle, updated every 20s
Live ticker - shows current alerts and delays in a scrolling format
Statistics - data for the previous week of service including vehicle counts and service reliability

Definitions

Schedule Adherence

Halifax Buses adopts its own defintions of 'early' and 'late' that are different from those used by Halifax transit.

Very late: More than 10 minutes late
Late: Between 3 and 10 minutes late
On time: Between 1 minute early and 2 minutes late
Early: Between 2 and 10 minutes early
Very early: More than 10 minutes early

Service Statuses

There are several statuses a bus may have besides early/on-time/late.

Added service: An additional service that was not timetabled. May be used to replace a cancelled service or add capacity during rush hour.
Cancelled: Service has been cancelled by Halifax Transit.
Awaiting departure: Bus is sitting at/near the first stop of its next service. Passengers may or may not be allowed to board.
Waiting: Bus has arrived early at its final stop and is waiting (GTFS has not yet recieved the next service for this bus).
ECS: Bus is heading empty towards the start of its route or to the depot as indicated by the destination. Not all ECS moves will appear on the tracker, they must have GTFS switched on and set to a route to register.
In transit: Bus is moving between unspecified locations, may be to/from depot or between routes. May be an in service bus with a temporary GTFS issue such as an undefined next stop.
Missing: The last GTFS update from this bus was more than 3 minutes ago and has not been updated or removed since.

Disclaimer

The following is some boring legal disclaimer stuff.

The data and information on this site are provided "as-is" without any warranties or guarantees of any kind. In some cases the data may be outdated or incorrect for any number of reasons: issues in the GTFS feed itself, a misplaced semi-colon somewhere in this site, failure of one or more backend services, etc...

The GTFS feed comes with the following disclaimer:

Halifax Regional Municipality may add, delete, or modify datasets without notice,and may cancel or restrict access to datasets for any reason.

Halifax Regional Municipality is not liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or other damages, including but not limited to damages for loss of revenue or anticipated profits resulting from your access (or lack of access) to datasets or your use of (or inability to use) datasets.

Licence

This is even more boring than the disclaimer.

Data is licenced under the Open Government Licence—Halifax.

Halifax Regional Municipality open data is released in accordance with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy provisions under Part XX of the Municipal Government Act (Nova Scotia), and may be used in accordance with this Open Government Licence—Halifax.

This licence is based on Version 2.0 of the Open Government Licence—Canada, which was developed through public consultation and a collaborative effort by the federal government and some of the provincial governments. The only substantive changes in this licence are to replace direct references to the Government of Canada with Halifax Regional Municipality, and to reference the laws applicable in Nova Scotia.

Privacy

Halifax Buses gathers no information on visitors. There are no ads. Third party services are used for some JavaScript libraries and fonts in order to reduce our outgoing bandwidth.

Server Info

Halifax Buses is hosted on a poor single CPU droplet with 0.5GB RAM, so please be kind to it. If it is down it has probably crashed and not been restarted yet. However in the event that does happen you won't be able to read this text to know that.

Feedback

If you want to give feedback on this site, you can do so here. Remember that your feedback will be visible to me so do not put any personal information in there.