Welcome to BCTracker!

It hasn't been too long since our last update, but we've already got a bunch of new things to share!

BC Transit has started releasing GTFS for many of the new systems we've added over the last year. Unfortunately, they also changed how buses are included in the data feed, so the NIS buses from those systems have disappeared. Luckily, realtime is starting to go live as well - buses from Smithers and other systems are already online, and more should be coming soon!

We've also made some big changes and improvements to the website, some of which you may have encountered already, and some of which are getting released along with this news post!

• Redesigned and improved the site-wide search bar and results
• Added support for seeing all systems at once on the routes map page
• Added date filters and statistics on the vehicle history page
• Added scheduled bus info to trip pages before they've run
• Bug fixes and performance improvements behind the scenes

Thank you for continuing to support BCTracker!

Hi everyone, quick announcement about some changes to the map screens. After Victoria's NextRide website was shut down last week, we've seen some big increases to how much our site is being used (which is great to see - welcome newcomers!!). The downside is the increase in site visits has put us well over the threshold for unpaid MapBox usage, and racked up some not-insignificant fees. As a one-time thing that's not a problem, but we'd rather not be paying double for maps what we pay for the rest of the website hosting every month.

As a result, we've decided to change the provider of our maps from MapBox to OpenLayers. If you've used the T-Comm site for Vancouver before this should look familiar - it uses the same OpenStreetMaps source. Overall everything should work more or less the same, with a couple of exceptions:

• The appearance of the map is now different, no longer as minimalist and no longer light/dark mode-dependent
• The geotracker for your current location, which was built-in with MapBox, is no longer available

Down the road as we get more used to this provider we hope to be able to undo those changes to get maps as close to how they used to be as possible. For now we thank you for your patience and understanding!