CTA "Unofficial" API

Chicago's Transit Authority recently released a couple webapps that allow people to track bus locations and routes. It is awesome. This is the documentation of the API they have exposed to power their apps.

Resources

• Visit project page
• List of API endpoints
• Projects built on this API
• Original blog post announcing the unofficial API
• CTA Hacking, Unofficial APIs and Winning a Data Innovation Award
• Google Group/Mailing list
• Check out cta alerts, @ctatweet on twitter and the python class to consume the CTA alerts

Press

• Harper Reed: "The power is not the mashup. It's the data." - DXO about the CTA api
• Hacking Chicago's Unofficial Transit API - Programable Web
• Great example of government-private cooperation: Harper Reed wins award for CTA's Bus Tracker API - CTA Tattler
• Interview about CTA API in AV Club Chicago

Notes

This documentation is NOT affiliated with CTA, Chicago or anything else official.

I have created a proxy for this API. It caches requests, and should be a LOT faster than accessing the API directly. The proxy is: http://chicago.transitapi.com.

PLEASE USE THE PROXY TO ACCESS THIS API IN YOUR APPLICATIONS.

To use the proxy, you will just need to replace ctabustracker.com with chicago.transitapi.com in the urls for your requests.

If you have issues, please visit the github repos and add an issue

About

This API was "created" by Harper Reed.

Follow @Harper on twitter for more hacks and hijinx

If you have questions - email harper@nata2.org. If you are bored, check out my blog.