What is the delay of the tram? After many years, data on the location of trams in Prague available online

Data on the position of trams is now being transferred to the central control room of Prague Integrated Transport, which has made them available to the public.

As of today, for the first time in history, passengers in Prague have officially available information on tram delays. In various transport applications and on the website of Dopravní podnik hl. m of Prague (DPP) or Prague Integrated Transport is now information about the location and possible delays. Passengers have been waiting for many years to make this data available, and a trial has taken place over them.

The Prague transport organizer Ropid informed about the novelty on social networks. Location information has been completely available for a long time, and in October it also reached on-line maps of Prague Integrated Transport.

🚋🔥 Hot news and long-standing debt in providing traffic information. Tram positions @DPPOficialni from today it also passes on to the central control room PID. From there, we distribute to all possible already known applications. pic.twitter.com/0hprPUOYs8

– PID (@PIDoficialni) December 30, 2020

Sharing the online location is possible thanks to sending it to the central control room of Prague Integrated Transport. Location and delay data are in the Píta Lítačka, IDOS applications, maps from Google and the Timetables application from the List and all others that use open PID data.

According to Ropid, trams send messages to the system when announcing stops and passing through a stop with an infrared beacon. There are most of them today. “The calculated delay is therefore relatively accurate, but the position on the map must be taken with a slight margin,“Ropid said on Facebook.

Trams are expected to be newer versions of the GNSS-based system. The contract for the supply of these devices was announced by DPP in June. DPP wants new multi-frequency receivers with antennas for trams, which will allow them to receive signals from the European navigation system Galileo, as well as GPS, Glonass and BeiDou. The new device is to replace a twenty-year-old system based on GPS and make the location of trams more accurate to 3.5 meters. Data from the system should also be open to passengers.

Disclosure of the location of trams has long blocked DPP’s contract with Xanthus. About the data for example, Jan Cibulka, a data journalist at Czech Radio, tried for several years.