Show HN: Ubähnchen – Animated subway map of Berlin (opens in new tab)

It's linked in the (somewhat easy to miss) about page

https://xn--ubhnchen-1za.vercel.app/en/about

The solution with fade out / fade in is pretty clever. Short layovers will cross-fade automatically, but you don’t need complicated internal information about which train continues from one run to the next.

Stopping would be neat, but may also be visually messy.

Strangely S-Bahn does stop at stations, U-Bahn does not.

Maybe a difference in the source data?

Another great one is https://www.worldmetro.io/map, which came out of a very cool Kickstarter project[1] that mashed up nearly every urban railway in the world into a huge, interconnected network. I bought one of the large 60” x 45” maps and I still sometimes sit and stare at it, trying to find the various stops where I’ve lived and worked over the years.

1. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1960956629/the-world-me...

OpenRailwayMap is also worth a mention: https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

It’s working on my iOS 15 iPad:

https://i.imgur.com/BAhNQJd.mp4

Related:

https://www.gleisplanweb.eu/index-e.php

http://sporenplan.nl/

I too thought for a moment that this was real-time until I noticed the absolutely frighting speed at which these trains would be passing through the tubes.

People waiting at a station would be sucked onto the tracks by the vortex created in the wake of a passing train. The front of the trains would probably be red hot with friction, while the passengers would be screaming until their train reached the end of the line, where it would pass out of existence, presumably into another dimension.

That is, until god slowed reality back down to 1x speed.

I don't know if VBB used this, but most transit agencies publish their data in two standard formats these days GTFS for static schedules and GTFS-real time for real-time data. Any application you build around these formats would immediately scale to pretty much every big city.

Google maps and Apple maps provide transit directions in their apps using GTFS and GTFS real time data (partly the reason why Apple maps was able to add transit directions feature so easily - Google had to deal with the transit agencies years before that and convinced them to publish data in open source standard formats).

Agreed on the minimetro feel!

I thought it was live too, I wonder if there's a way to do that? I like that you can see both the s and u bahn, though I kind of wish the abstract map would carry over.

Yeah the ridiculous speed confused me for a little bit before I saw the “x50“ up in the corner.

This is really great, and despite saying it’s desktop optimized it worked great on my iPhone.

Love it.

It's such a shame that the official Tram network map [1] almost fits the U-Bahn/S-Bahn map [2], but not exactly.

My assumption is that, when BVG designed these, they had separate maps in mind already early in the process, because including all station names on a tiny printed map is not feasible. With those transparent maps at the trams' windows though, or especially with a digital zoomable map, this would be completely feasible.

According to a BVG email from a few years ago, there isn't even a machine-readable version of this map, which is why I hand-digitised it. [3] So sad because the creativeness of the internet combined with a "remixabe" [4] (or at least forkable) version would likely kick off cool projects!

If anyone wants to attempt merging them, please open an Issue in [5] to let me know!

PS: Do you know about the (experimental) BVG bus map? [6]

[1] https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:d45105f2-6752-4ec5-b882-893657205... [2] https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:60a89e3b-f88d-4d48-b8a6-98ab340ad... [3] https://github.com/derhuerst/bvg-topological-map/issues/7#is... [4] https://github.com/derhuerst/remix-bvg-map-frontend [5] https://github.com/derhuerst/bvg-topological-map [6] https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:ee4647c3-ce1e-4b0a-9546-b1848b85e...

How about this one? It also includes the rest of Germany:

https://travic.app/?z=13&x=1493233.2&y=6894127.0

This exists, built by the VBB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32647874

There's actually a button in the upper right corner to enable both S+U Bahn! Although the app gets a little sluggish for me when I enable them both.

When you say "operator": isn't it all BVG?

In the Shinjuku city hall many years ago there was an animation showing how population desitiy changes in Tokyo during one day. It was absolutely mindblowing, but I have never been able to find it online.

If someone happens to know where I can find this animation I would be really grateful.

Thanks for sharing this! It will definitely be helpful, as I am considering updating my map to use WebGL.

Wow, it even includes weather (rain) and airplanes.

For those like me who just see a regular map, click on "Livekarte & Multi-Mobilität" on the right, then "Livekarte", and then "An".

Same here. A profile suggests that most native time is spent rendering the backdrop shadow of the text rendered to the canvas, and most of the remaining CPU time is spent on the drawText Javascript call.

Looks like Mozilla has something to optimize!

Totally unusable in Firefox on Windows 10 as well.

I love it. I'm from Poland and lived for a while in Warsaw, where public transport also has all this kind of tracking, BUT the operator when asked about making this data available to travelers, he replied something like "Why would people need it? It's internal data and it will stay like that".

Same for me, even I set "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" to true. Chrome and Chromium are smooth.

EDIT: Turning "High Resolution" (in the settings of the webpage on top right) off and on seems to fix the issue somehow? It's smooth now, but reloading takes it back to choppy.

It's definitely a website bug, as goes from 1 FPS to smooth if you go to S+U and back to U again. (debugger didn't help, but it's all minified anyway)

Not even 1 FPS on my Firefox and it's also eating CPU like nothing. Good thing: This kind of simulates the sound of the subway.

(Nevertheless: Beautiful!)

On Safari the animations are smooth but mouse clicks are barely registered or only after a few seconds.

It's also smooth for me (also Chrome) in "U-Bahn only" mode, but when I switch to "U+S", it's noticeably less smooth (10 fps?). It gets better if you deactivate the "city map background" in the settings.

Works fine on Firefox for me

Try clicking on the S+U on the right. In Chrome it’s super smooth on the U view, but somehow when you switch to the S+U one it’s very laggy.

With firefox on android, even though it says it isn't optimized, it runs perfectly smooth even in s+u mode

It's getting choppy for me in Chrome when enabling the S and U Bahn mode

Worth checking that Firefox is (also) using the GPU correctly.

Same for me (FF103.0.2 on Ubuntu 22.04)

Smooth for me on FF (desktop).

Seems good for me

It's mentioned in the 'about' page (click the 'i' link) - https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32647603&goto=item%3Fi...

> Schedules are extracted from the GTFS data of the VBB (loaded on Fri, 26 Aug 2022 13:11:26 GMT) which contains arrival time and departure time of every hour of every day. The movement of the train is simulated at constant speed between stations.

Ha! I worked on that, nice seeing it here

Thanks for the comment! It made me realize I forgot to move a file. It's fixed now (you might need to clear your cache). And the live data toggle is now enabled.

the S-Bahn there actually has a DB-provided live-map https://s-bahn-muenchen-live.de

I don't know, if they have an open API though (Google of course gets access. Which is......)

Note that this just interpolates the vehicles' positions based on their delay, which in turn is calculated based on periodic pings that the vehicle sends AFAIK. So the map does not show realtime positions in the same sense as e.g. HSL's trip planner does [1][2]. In fact, the location and speed of a vehicle can be very off.

Personally, I loathe this map, because it gives an impression of accurate data, even though it isn't that precise. VBB gets credit for providing supposedly reliable data, even though they could (and should, given amount of tax money spent) provide much better data!

[1] In the departures section on the left, tap on one of the upcoming departures to see the vehicle in realtime: https://reittiopas.hsl.fi/terminaalit/HSL%3A1000105?locale=e... [2] https://digitransit.fi/en/developers/apis/4-realtime-api/veh...

I think it is just a toy :)

But the trains are sort-of-actual positions based on the time in the top right hand corner and the latest estimated arrival times, but time is moving forwards at 50x speed.