scot.live — planes, boats and trains across Scotland, live

What is happening in your city, right now.

Dozens of organisations publish live data about a Scottish city — the coastguard, the power network, the rail industry, the environment agency, the bus operators. Almost all of it is public, and almost none of it is anywhere you would look. It sits in a dozen separate portals, each with its own map, its own login and its own idea of what a website is.

This puts it on one map, per city, updated live.

Pick your city How it works

Cities

About

A city generates an enormous amount of live public information and gives its residents almost no way to see it together. You can find out that the power is off, or that the Dee is high, or that a road is shut, or that diesel is 8p cheaper a mile away — but only by visiting four different websites, and only if you already knew to look.

The premise here is that the interesting thing is the overview: not any one feed, but all of them at once, on the geography you already have in your head. A power cut next to a road closure next to a river gauge reads differently from any of them alone.

It is built for residents rather than for enthusiasts or for operators. That shapes the decisions: no login, no app to install, no configuration, and it has to be fast on a phone on mobile data. It is an independent site, not an official service.

Everything it draws comes from somebody else's feed, and the map says who, on a page that also shows how long ago each one last answered. Where a value is inferred rather than observed — train positions between stations, most obviously — it says so on the map itself, not only in the small print.

It is free to read and funded by affiliate links, which are labelled wherever they appear. They never influence the data. Nothing is ranked, ordered or left off the map because of a commercial relationship — the whole point of the thing is that it has no stake in the answer. How this is paid for →

Sources

Every feed behind every city — who publishes it, what it covers, which cities use it and under what licence — is listed in one place. It is generated from the running system rather than written by hand, so it cannot quietly go out of date.

Whether a feed is answering right now is a different question, and a per-city one, because the cities do not all use the same feeds: Aberdeen has the NorthLink ferries and SSEN's wires, Edinburgh the Fringe and SP Energy Networks'. Each map reports on its own.

Before you rely on it

This is a best-effort view of other people's data. It goes out of date, it goes wrong, and sometimes a feed stops answering and the map keeps showing the last thing it said. None of it is safety information.

Something wrong, or something to say?

These maps are built out of other people's live data, and live data gets things wrong. If a bus time looks off, a river reads oddly, or a page is broken on your browser, telling us is the fastest way it gets fixed.

What kind of thing is it?

Goes to a private tracker the maintainer reads. What you type is stored; nothing else about you is, and nothing is shared with anyone.