New England in Motion

One live map of transportation moving across Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Start with Greater Boston (the 128 cities and towns inside I-495), narrow to the 17-municipality MBTA core, pick one of 23 named regions such as Cape Cod & Islands, the Pioneer Valley or Midcoast Maine, switch to a single state, or zoom out to all New England.

The map combines live and scheduled public transportation, aircraft, boats, shared mobility, traffic, road events, public traffic cameras, major roads, freight rail, and walking/cycling networks. Live points are clipped to generalized U.S. Census TIGERweb boundaries, so Greater Boston, the MBTA core, every named region, each state, and “All New England” are geographic filters rather than agency-name guesses. Every feature is labeled live, estimated, scheduled, or reference so a published route never masquerades as a moving vehicle.

What works

Layer	Source	Cadence
MBTA subway, Silver Line, buses, commuter rail, ferries	MBTA V3 API	10 s
Regional buses	Agency GTFS-realtime feeds, normalized by the gateway	20 s
Metro-North New Haven branches	MTA GTFS-Realtime trip predictions and alerts; positions are explicitly estimated between stations	30 s
Scheduled/reference bus, rail, ferry, boat, and air-service routes and stops	93 GTFS sources plus 80 official-service corridors, including Amtrak, Metro-North, Shore Line East, regional coaches, university shuttles, 93 ferry routes, municipal water shuttles, small-island lifelines, island air taxis, and 38,000+ scheduled stops	built snapshot
Small-town, county, flex, volunteer, microtransit, and on-demand water-service catalog	50 official-directory service markers across all six states	built snapshot
Amtrak	Amtrak official static GTFS for scheduled routes/stations; Amtraker community API for live trains	built snapshot + 90 s
Aircraft and air services	ADSB.lol with adsb.fi failover; 18 optional official Cape Air/Tradewind schedules and Penobscot Island Air on-demand corridors	45 s + built snapshot
Airports and landing facilities	778 open airports, heliports, seaplane bases, and other facilities from the FAA NASR subscription	28-day built snapshot
Harbor/coastal vessels and identifiable passenger ferries	AISStream through a protected WebSocket relay	streaming
Bike and scooter share	GBFS feeds for Bluebikes across 13 Greater Boston municipalities, Veo Hartford, Veo New Haven, and Spin Providence	60 s
Work zones and closures	MassDOT WZDx plus the multi-state New England 511 WZDx feed for Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont	5 min
Traffic incidents	New England 511 (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont), CTroads, and MassDOT Highway Division roadway events (crashes, disabled vehicles, weather closures)	60 s
Public traffic cameras	New England 511, CTroads, and the MassDOT CCTV asset inventory	5 min
Live congestion speeds	Public 511 traffic-flow tiles through the gateway; TomTom remains an optional configured fallback	live tiles
Weather alerts	NWS active alerts for the six states, drawn as severity-colored forecast-zone polygons; Extreme/Severe alerts also join the service-alert panel	120 s (60 s edge cache)
Airport delays	FAA NAS airport status ground stops, ground-delay programs, arrival/departure delays, and closures, drawn as rings on the FAA airport markers	120 s (60 s edge cache)
Major roads and freight rail	U.S. Census TIGERweb primary roads and the FRA North American Rail Network	built snapshot
Canada border crossings	38 road, rail, ferry, and remote-traveller facilities from the CBSA Directory of Offices	built snapshot
Marked walking and cycling routes	OpenStreetMap route relations via Waymarked Trails	live map tiles
Heritage and scenic railroads	17 hand-curated operator routes (scripts/heritage-railroads.json), snapped to the FRA rail network where the tourist line runs on mapped track	built snapshot
Park-and-ride lots	MassDOT GeoDOT, CTDOT, VTrans, and MaineDOT ArcGIS services plus the NHDOT inventory republished by SWRPC	built snapshot
Public EV charging	NREL/NLR Alternative Fuel Stations API DC fast and Level 2 stations across all six states	built snapshot
Drawbridges and movable bridges	25 hand-curated bridges with opening rules from 33 CFR 117 Subpart B	built snapshot

The aircraft layer no longer calls airplanes.live. That service now rejects this project with HTTP 403, and ADS-B providers do not expose browser CORS headers. The server-side aircraft relay fixes both problems without weakening browser security, fails over from ADSB.lol to adsb.fi, and uses CDN stale- while-revalidate caching to keep the last good positions during a provider interruption.

Aircraft origin and destination are resolved only after a plane is clicked. The lookup is a best-effort callsign match against ADSB.lol's route catalog; private, repositioning, and irregular flights may not have an itinerary.

Regional transit coverage

The checked-in route snapshot contains more than 1,200 bus, commuter-rail, Amtrak, ferry, passenger-boat, and air-service route features plus more than 37,000 scheduled bus stops, ferry landings, T stops, and rail stations, assembled from 93 GTFS sources and 80 official-service corridors. Scheduled routes remain visible when an operator publishes no live positions. Every view except the MBTA core, Greater Boston, statewide Massachusetts and All New England starts with the scheduled bus layer on, and the sidebar reports scheduled route counts separately from live vehicles, so a missing realtime credential no longer makes service look absent. Rail and T stops are visible first, named ferry landings appear at harbor zoom, and tiny collision-aware bus-stop labels appear only at close street zoom. Every stop opens a source-attributed popup with its routes and published accessibility information.

Regions

Every region lives in one file, scripts/regions-config.json; scripts/build-regions.py turns it into data/regions.geojson, and the picker, the permalink, the route tags and the default layers all read from there. The picker groups regions by state:

• Boston area: Greater Boston (inside I-495), the default for first-time visitors: the 128 Massachusetts cities and towns with at least half their area inside the I-495 ring (closed along the coast). The builder recomputes the ring from data/infrastructure.geojson and fails if the town list drifts. MBTA core (key boston, formerly labelled Greater Boston): Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Newton, Quincy, Braintree, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, Malden, Medford, Arlington, Belmont, Watertown, Milton, and Winthrop.
• Massachusetts: Merrimack Valley (LRTA and MeVa member communities, including Lowell and Lawrence), Worcester County, Pioneer Valley (Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin), the Berkshires, South Coast (Bristol County), Cape Cod & Islands.
• Rhode Island: Providence metro (Providence, Kent, Bristol), Newport & South County (Newport, Washington, including Block Island).
• Connecticut (2022 Census planning regions): Hartford (Capitol), New Haven & Shoreline, Fairfield County (Western CT and Greater Bridgeport), Eastern Connecticut.
• New Hampshire: NH Seacoast, Manchester, Nashua & Concord, Lakes & White Mountains.
• Vermont: Burlington & Champlain Valley, Southern Vermont.
• Maine: Portland & Southern Maine, Midcoast Maine, Downeast & Acadia, Central & Western Maine, Bangor & the North.
• New England: All New England and the Upper Valley (Windsor and Orange, VT; Grafton and Sullivan, NH).

Old links still open where they did: ?region=boston, a saved MBTA core selection, and a shared hash with a camera but no r= all open the MBTA core. Sub-regions ask the gateway for their parent state (the Upper Valley asks for new-england) and clip the results in the browser, so the gateway still only knows the eight IDs listed under Gateway API.

Presets and scenes

Above the layer list, Default, Routes and Clear work as before. The Show row switches on one kind of vehicle (Rail, Buses, Water, Air, Roads, Bikes, or All live). The Scenes row sets a region and its layers in one tap: Boston commute, Harbor watch, Islands by sea & air, Road trip, and Maine islands. Presets live in js/presets.js as plain data. Metro-North's New Haven, New Canaan, Danbury, and Waterbury lines are included in Connecticut; connected routes are allowed to continue outside the selected boundary so riders can see the full trip into New York City. CTDOT's Shore Line East (New London–Old Saybrook–New Haven, with its Bridgeport and Stamford through trips) comes from the Shore Line East agency inside Amtrak's official GTFS. That agency publishes no track shapes, so its ribbon follows the matching slices of Amtrak's published Northeast Corridor shapes between Shore Line East stations and is labeled approximate. South Portland Bus Service merged into Greater Portland METRO in December 2024; its routes 21, 24A, and 24B now come from METRO's feed, and the retired South Portland static feed (last service 2025-10-05) is no longer built. The Current (Bellows Falls / Brattleboro) ended service in 2022 and its area is covered by MOOver!, so it is no longer listed.

Concord Coach's seven intercity routes use a community-maintained GTFS feed cataloged and continuously validated by Transitland. Greyhound and FlixBus use their current official U.S. GTFS feed; the build keeps only trip patterns that actually touch a New England state. Peter Pan Bus Lines uses the same New England-only trip filter on its Trillium-published GTFS, which keeps 34 of its 51 route patterns (Boston, Cape Cod, Providence, Worcester, Springfield, Hartford, the Berkshires, and their New York/Newark connections). That file is the carrier's last published schedule (feed version June 2024, nominal end date 2024-12-31), so Peter Pan ribbons are labeled scheduled corridors rather than a current timetable. Dartmouth Coach does not publish a discoverable GTFS feed, so its Upper Valley–Boston/Logan and Upper Valley–NYC corridors follow the stop order on the carrier's official schedules and link back to those schedules from the map popup. These intercity carriers are shown as schedules, not invented live vehicle positions.

Small-system and campus coverage (September 2026 additions): Northeastern Connecticut Transit District (5 routes) and Northwestern Connecticut Transit District (6 routes) now publish static GTFS and draw as scheduled ribbons instead of directory markers, as do Sullivan County Transportation in New Hampshire (8 routes), Waldo Community Action Partners' Rockland and Belfast DASH loops in Maine (2 routes), C&J Bus Lines' Portsmouth–Boston/Logan coach (1 route), and Yankee Trails' Albany–Bennington line (1 route, kept only where it touches Vermont). University shuttles are drawn in the bus group and tagged serviceClass: "campus": Harvard (3 drawn routes), MIT (7), Tufts (7), Boston University (5), Boston College (13), UMass Boston (1), Brown (4), the University of Rhode Island (3), and Eastern Connecticut State University (3); special-event, charter, and out-of-service patterns are filtered out. Tri-County Transit's North Country GTFS is reachable but its calendar ended on 2026-06-30, so its two flex routes stay directory markers until it is re-published.

Vermont includes regional routes from every discoverable public GTFS source in the current audit, including Green Mountain Transit, Vermont Translines, and intercity Greyhound/FlixBus connections. Official Amtrak schedule data adds the Vermonter and Ethan Allen Express as persistent rail-following ribbons and all 14 Vermont stations. Burlington Union Station (BTN) is kept distinct from Essex Junction–Burlington (ESX) because they serve different routes. Amtraker remains the separately attributed community source for live train positions. Lake Champlain's current Grand Isle–Plattsburgh and Charlotte–Essex crossings are joined by the seasonal Shoreham–Ticonderoga ferry. Lake Champlain Transportation does not currently list Burlington–Port Kent as an operating crossing, so Burlington is not given a fictional ferry line. The map instead marks Burlington's real Spirit of Ethan Allen and Buttercup passenger cruises, the Inland Sea's on-demand Spring Beach Ferry, and Vermont State Parks' restricted 2026 Kill Kare–Burton Island passenger ferry. New Hampshire includes both public Star Island approaches, published 2026 Mount Washington Cruises corridors, and the Sophie C island mailboat itinerary on Lake Winnipesaukee. Maine includes the six state-ferry links plus Chebeague, Isle au Haut, Monhegan, the Cranberry Isles, Schoodic, Eastport–Lubec, Frye Island, Swan Island WMA, Mount Kineo, and The CAT to Nova Scotia.

Connecticut coverage now includes all four current regional Long Island Sound connections: New London–Orient Point, Bridgeport–Port Jefferson, New London–Montauk, and New London–Fishers Island, plus Block Island, both state river ferries, and municipal island/water-taxi services. Rhode Island adds Prudence Island, Providence–Bristol–Newport, Newport–Block Island, and the Jamestown/Newport harbor network. Massachusetts adds the non-MBTA Boston Seaport routes, Seastreak's three South Coast/islands corridors, Island Queen, Patriot, Pied Piper, Chappy Ferry, Harwich–Nantucket, two additional Provincetown services, and smaller public harbor and island shuttles. Each official-schedule popup identifies its service type and season and labels the line as an approximate water path rather than a live vessel track. AIS may add a live marker only when a vessel is independently broadcasting and received by the configured provider. Every ferry line is drawn from scripts/ferry-water-cache.json, an audited geometry cache built from, in order of preference, the operator's GTFS shape, an OpenStreetMap route=ferry way matched to both published landings, or hand-drawn controls. Any stretch that crosses land is rerouted on a water grid and then simplified and smoothed only where the result stays in water. The audit (osm-land-v3) measures each line against OpenStreetMap coastline land polygons minus OSM lakes, riverbanks, and docks: no interior dry run may exceed 25 metres, no dry run within 300 metres of a landing may exceed 150 metres (landings sit on piers), no path may cross itself, and every path must be longer than 0.15 km and at least 0.95 times its terminal-to-terminal distance. The geometry check (npm run check) verifies every ferry feature against its cache entry, so a feed update or manual edit cannot silently restore an over-land line; scripts/ferry-water-report.md lists each route's source and before/after dry metres. The active MBTA Boat-Lynn feed supplies Lynn–Boston service directly, while the seasonal Salem–Boston Long Wharf service is retained as an explicit official-schedule corridor so it remains visible without live vessel data.

Bluebikes is a Greater Boston system rather than a statewide brand. Its public feed covers Arlington, Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Malden, Medford, Newton, Revere, Salem, Somerville, and Watertown. The same regional layer also includes the separately operated Hartford, New Haven, and Providence systems. No discoverable public GBFS system is currently cataloged for Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine, so the map does not fabricate stations there.

The Local & on-demand services layer fills a different gap. It currently catalogs 50 services that do not have reliable route geometry or public live positions: Maine county transportation, New Hampshire community providers, Massachusetts microtransit, Connecticut's nine CTDOT microtransit programs, RIPTA Flex zones, Vermont's regional demand-response providers, and on-demand Boston Harbor and Maine coastal water taxis. These are service-area reference points with links to the official provider—not pretend bus paths.

Metro-North is different: the MTA publishes keyless realtime trip updates and alerts, but not GPS vehicle positions. Motion interpolates active New Haven, New Canaan, Danbury, and Waterbury trains between their reported stations and labels every popup “Estimated position from MTA trip updates.”

The gateway currently knows these live vehicle-position feeds:

• Massachusetts: MBTA, Pioneer Valley Transit Authority, Brockton Area Transit, Montachusett RTA, and Franklin RTA (the last three through Passio's public GTFS-realtime endpoints); WRTA and GATRA (public Cadavl GTFS-realtime producers); MIT and Tufts campus shuttles (Passio); Merrimack Valley Transit is included through the optional Swiftly authorization
• Connecticut: CTtransit, HARTransit, River Valley Transit (the merged Middletown Area Transit / 9 Town Transit district, via Passio), Norwalk Transit District, and UConn / Windham Region Transit District (Passio)
• Rhode Island: RIPTA and Brown University shuttles (Passio)
• Maine: Greater Portland METRO (including the former South Portland Bus Service routes) and Island Explorer; Casco Bay Lines ferries are included through the optional Swiftly authorization
• New Hampshire/Vermont: COAST (Passio) and Advance Transit, plus Nashua Transit System and Vermont's GMT, GMCN, Marble Valley, MOOver!, RCT, and Tri-Valley feeds

The Swiftly-hosted providers above (Merrimack Valley, Casco Bay Lines, Nashua, Advance Transit, and the Vermont agencies) use Swiftly's authorized realtime API. Their adapters are included, but they report needs-key until SWIFTLY_API_KEY is configured. Agencies that publish only schedules, use a closed tracker, or do not expose a current vehicle feed still appear as scheduled route ribbons, but are not misrepresented as live dots.

Some intercity GTFS files publish only terminal stops or incomplete shapes. The snapshot builder replaces bus gaps longer than 20 km with a cached, approximate road-following path from OpenStreetMap/Project OSRM. These repairs run only at build time, remain labeled approximate in the popup, and never make network requests from a visitor's browser. Amtrak's build uses only official nonempty rail shapes and never substitutes straight stop-to-stop lines. A geometry check prevents a future feed update from restoring a map-spanning straight bus or Amtrak line.

Rebuild the static route snapshot after agencies update their schedules:

py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-regions.py
py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-regional-routes.py
py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-airports.py
py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-border-crossings.py
py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-reference-places.py

Build regions first: the route and reference builders tag every feature with each region it touches. After only the regions change, py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-reference-places.py --retag-only retags the reference places offline.

Normal rebuilds read ferry geometry from scripts/ferry-water-cache.json and need no water data. When a ferry feed, catalog entry, or scripts/ferry-geometry-sources.json changes (or a new ferry is added), fetch the OpenStreetMap water model once and refresh the cache. The fetch downloads the ~925 MB osmdata.openstreetmap.de land-polygon file once, keeps only New England (west -74.2, south 40.7, east -65.8, north 47.8) in a compact .codex-research/water-audit/osm-land-ne.wkb.json, and caches Overpass inland water (natural=water, waterway=riverbank, waterway=dock) where ferry corridors cross coastline land, plus all OSM route=ferry ways:

py -3 -X utf8 scripts\fetch-ferry-audit-data.py
py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-regional-routes.py --update-ferry-cache
py -3 -X utf8 scripts\audit-ferry-water.py --cache
py -3 -X utf8 scripts\audit-ferry-water.py --report --before <old regional-routes.geojson>

--update-ferry-cache recomputes only routes whose inputs changed (a full --refresh-ferry-cache takes a few minutes); it needs shapely, scipy, and pyshp. A ferry without a cache entry is still drawn from its raw source, but the geometry check fails with instructions to run the command above.

Normal rebuilds make no road-router requests: that portion uses the checked-in cache. The builder still downloads each agency's current GTFS schedule, so the route snapshot can change when a provider updates its feed. A maintainer can explicitly fetch generic road geometry for newly discovered long gaps (at a rate limited to the public router's usage guidance), then review and commit the updated cache:

py -3 -X utf8 scripts\build-regional-routes.py --update-road-cache

Every route build also records the last date each GTFS feed publishes service for (the latest calendar.txt end date or added calendar_dates.txt date, falling back to feed_info.txt only when a feed has no calendar; YYYYMMDD, M/D/YYYY, and ISO dates are accepted) in scripts/feed-freshness.json. To refresh only that file, without rebuilding geometry, run:

py -3 -X utf8 scripts\check-feed-freshness.py

It exits non-zero and names the feed when a schedule ends within seven days. A feed with no current replacement can carry "freshness_exempt": "<reason>" in scripts/regional-feeds.json (currently Peter Pan's 2024 GTFS and VTA's seasonal summer feed). Feeds whose server rejects scripted downloads can set a per-feed "user_agent".

Reviewed interstate controls keep New York-bound coaches off bus-restricted Connecticut and New York parkways. Use --refresh-road-cache when those controls or the routing method change and every cached repair must be regenerated. The geometry check rejects long chords, loops, stale cache entries, and excessive road detours before a release.

Approximate repaired geometry is derived from OpenStreetMap contributors using the Project OSRM route service; an operator's actual roadway may vary.

The Airports & landing facilities layer includes public and private FAA facilities, with private sites held back until a closer zoom. The air-service ribbons distinguish scheduled Cape Air/Tradewind routes from Penobscot Island Air's on-demand links between Knox County Regional Airport and Matinicus, Vinalhaven, North Haven, and Islesboro. Those lines show service relationships, not actual or live flight tracks, and start switched off so they do not obscure surface and water routes or live aircraft.

The Canada border crossings layer uses the current CBSA office directory for New England's Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont frontier. It includes ordinary roads, rail inspection points, the Campobello–Lubec crossing, and remote-traveller pilot facilities. Canadian-side control points retain their adjacent U.S. state tag, so state filters keep the correct crossings in view.

The Movement infrastructure section also carries four reference-place layers built by scripts/build-reference-places.py into data/reference-places.geojson. Heritage and scenic railroads are a hand-curated list of operators confirmed running in 2026 (Conway Scenic, the Cog, Hobo/Winnipesaukee, Essex, Naugatuck, Cape Cod Central, Berkshire Scenic, Vermont Rail System's Champlain Valley Dinner Train, Maine Narrow Gauge, Belfast & Moosehead Lake, Downeast Scenic, WW&F, Seashore Trolley, Shelburne Falls Trolley, and the Lowell NHP trolley); ten follow the FRA rail network and the two-foot, cog, and streetcar lines are drawn as labeled approximate paths. Park-and-ride lots come from each state DOT's ArcGIS service (Rhode Island publishes none; New Hampshire's is a 2013 inventory and its popup says so). Public EV charging keeps only stations with DC fast or Level 2 ports and is hidden below zoom 10 because it is dense. Drawbridges are the major movable bridges whose opening rules are published in 33 CFR 117, each popup linking the governing section. All four start switched off, are clipped to the selected region, and are reference points rather than live status.

Find things and share views

The Find box at the top of the console searches everything already loaded on the page — 38,000+ stops, stations, and ferry landings, every scheduled route ribbon, the eight geographies, and municipalities that appear in stop names — with no external geocoder. Arrow keys, Enter, and Esc work as in any combobox. Picking a stop flies to it and opens its popup; picking a route highlights the ribbon and fits it in view; picking a geography switches the region. MBTA stop popups add a live "Next arrivals" block from the MBTA V3 predictions endpoint (up to three per route, refreshed every 15 seconds while the popup is open); other operators publish schedules only, and their popups say so instead of inventing an ETA. The URL hash keeps the region, camera, any layer switched away from its default, and the data-truth filter (#r=ct&c=-72.68,41.76&z=12&on=bike&off=commuter&s=live,scheduled), so copying the address shares exactly the view on screen. ?region= still works and takes second place to the hash.

Follow a vehicle

Click any moving vehicle to select it: a ring marks it and a trip card opens (top right on desktop, a bottom sheet on phones). Press Follow and the map locks onto it. The followed vehicle glides across about 90% of its feed's poll interval at constant speed, so the camera pans continuously instead of jumping every 10 seconds; every other vehicle keeps the short snap. Dragging the map releases the lock but keeps the card; zooming keeps the lock and remembers the zoom; Esc or × closes it. Region changes, alert focus, layer zoom, and search fly-tos also release the lock.

The Find box matches live vehicles too: commuter-rail, Amtrak, and Metro-North train numbers (5747), MBTA car labels, regional bus vehicle numbers, aircraft callsigns (JBU lists every JetBlue flight), and route names (red line, route 39). Picking a vehicle locks onto it at once. An empty box lists recently followed vehicles that are still reporting.

The card shows what each feed actually publishes:

Fleet	Card detail
MBTA	Next six stops with ETA, clock time, track (commuter rail), and delay against the schedule, from /predictions?filter[trip]=…, polled every 15 s only while following
Amtrak	Upcoming stations with ETA and early/late, from the Amtraker train record
Metro-North	Next stop and minutes only; position is estimated between stations
Aircraft	Best-effort scheduled route for the callsign
Regional buses, vessels	Route, vehicle number, speed

A followed vehicle adds f=<fleet>:<id> to the URL hash, so Copy link shares a view that opens locked onto that vehicle once its feed reports it (or explains why after 30 to 120 seconds). If a vehicle drops out of its feed, the card waits three poll intervals before giving up. The commuter-rail train number is the tail of the MBTA trip id (SouthBase-793096-5847), checked on every line on 2026-09-27; the car label MBTA puts on the vehicle is not the number riders know.

Run the map

The MBTA, Amtrak, regional route, and shared-mobility layers work with only the static server:

npm install
npm run dev
# http://localhost:5500

Gateway setup

Aircraft, public regional-bus feeds, road events, cameras, and traffic tiles use a gateway. The public 511 sources are keyless; AIS and some optional regional realtime adapters need provider credentials. The live site uses the deployed gateway at https://motion-gateway.mapzimus.workers.dev and the aircraft relay at https://motion-aircraft-gateway.vercel.app automatically.

Copy-Item .dev.vars.example .dev.vars
# Edit .dev.vars; AIS, TomTom, and Swiftly are all optional.
npm run gateway:dev

In a second terminal:

npm run dev
# Open http://localhost:5500/?gateway=http://localhost:8787

Local gateway overrides persist in localStorage, so they only need to be supplied once. Provider keys never enter the page URL, localStorage, or the frontend bundle.

The aircraft-gateway/ Vercel Function gives the aircraft feed separate outbound networking because both public ADS-B providers rate-limit or block Cloudflare's shared Worker egress. Successful responses are cached for 30 seconds and can be served stale for five minutes while a refresh retries.

Deploy the gateway

The Worker has separate staging and production environments. Create secrets in the environment where they will be used:

npx wrangler login
npx wrangler secret put AISSTREAM_API_KEY --env production
npx wrangler secret put TOMTOM_API_KEY --env production
npx wrangler secret put SWIFTLY_API_KEY --env production
npx wrangler deploy --env production

AISStream, TomTom, and Swiftly are optional. Without TomTom the traffic layer uses public New England 511 tiles. SWIFTLY_API_KEY must be the complete value expected by the Swiftly Authorization header. Add any custom production frontend origin to ALLOWED_ORIGINS in wrangler.jsonc before deployment.

Enable live vessels (AIS)

The vessel layer stays empty until the gateway has an AISStream key.

1. Create a free API key at aisstream.io (sign in, then "API Keys").
2. Store it on the production Worker: npx wrangler secret put AISSTREAM_API_KEY --env production
3. Redeploy: npx wrangler deploy --env production
4. Open the gateway's /health and confirm it shows "ais":true.

How the vessel feed works:

• One shared upstream. AISStream allows only 3 connections per account, so the gateway does not open one per browser. A single AisHub Durable Object (worker/src/ais-hub.ts, SQLite-backed so it runs on the Free plan) holds one AISStream socket for the whole New England box and fans frames out to every viewer by region. Any number of viewers use 1 of the 3 slots.
• Instant snapshot. A new viewer first gets one Snapshot frame with every vessel the hub already knows in that region, stamped with the server time it was last heard, so the map fills in immediately and old positions dim.
• Lifecycle. The first viewer starts the upstream. A 60-second alarm reconnects it with backoff, prunes vessels not heard for 15 minutes, saves the snapshot as one storage row, and closes the upstream 5 minutes after the last viewer leaves. Deploys drop the upstream; the saved snapshot covers the gap while it reconnects. The Durable Object migration applies on the first wrangler deploy after this change.
• Coastal filter. Vessels are filtered against data/regions-marine.geojson (each region grown about 0.2 degrees, or 0.06 degrees for the MBTA core, and clipped to the AIS box) so ships just offshore are not cut off. Rebuild it with py -3 scripts/build-regions.py --marine-only.
• Lakes gap. Inland lakes such as Champlain and Winnipesaukee rarely show vessels: few boats there broadcast AIS and AISStream has little receiver coverage inland. The New York half of Lake Champlain only counts where it is within the coastal buffer of Vermont.

Deploy the separate aircraft relay from its own project directory:

Set-Location aircraft-gateway
npx vercel link --yes --project motion-aircraft-gateway
npx vercel --prod --yes

Gateway API

Endpoint	Purpose
GET /health	Provider status without exposing secrets; a provider reads true when its last upstream fetch succeeded within 10 minutes (or has not been attempted yet)
GET /api/planes?region=ma	Deduplicated, normalized ADS-B aircraft (Vercel relay only; the Worker no longer serves this path)
GET /api/route?callsign=AAL108	Best-effort aircraft origin and destination (Vercel relay)
GET /api/transit?region=ct	Normalized GTFS-realtime bus positions and per-feed health
GET /api/mnr	Metro-North active trip segments and service alerts from official MTA GTFS-Realtime
GET /api/roadwork	Active/upcoming MassDOT and northern New England WZDx geometry
GET /api/road-events	Official New England 511, CTroads, and MassDOT roadway-event incidents (planned MassDOT closures are left to /api/roadwork)
GET /api/cameras	Public camera locations from 511, CTroads, and MassDOT
GET /api/camera-detail?provider=north&id=…	Latest public 511 camera image and official viewer details
GET /api/traffic/{z}/{x}/{y}.png	Cached public 511 congestion tile, with optional TomTom source
GET /api/airport-status	FAA NAS status (ground stops, ground-delay programs, arrival/departure delays, closures) for New England airports
GET /api/weather-alerts?region=ma	NWS active alerts for the region's states as GeoJSON; forecast-zone polygons are resolved, simplified, and capped per request
GET /api/ais?region=new-england with WebSocket upgrade	Shared AISStream feed: a Snapshot frame of known vessels in the region, then live AISStream frames for that region

Supported region IDs are boston, ma, ct, ri, nh, vt, me, and new-england; the browser maps each named sub-region to its parent before calling the gateway. Browser origins are allowlisted. Provider responses are cached briefly at the edge to avoid multiplying load.

Architecture

Public browser-safe APIs ───────────────┐
  MBTA · static GTFS · Amtraker · GBFS │
                                       ├─ MapLibre fleets ─ Census region filter
Cloudflare Worker gateway ─────────────┤
  agency GTFS-RT · MTA MNR · 511 · WZDx · cameras · NWS · FAA · AIS│
Vercel aircraft relay ─────────────────┘
  ADSB.lol · adsb.fi · route lookup

The frontend remains plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The gateways are TypeScript and run on Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Functions. Cloudflare gateway tests execute inside the Workers runtime with Cloudflare's Vitest integration.

Verify changes

npm run check
npm test
npm run deploy:dry-run

npm run check includes an offline feed-freshness guard: every feed in scripts/regional-feeds.json must appear in scripts/feed-freshness.json, and every non-exempt feed must publish service at least seven days past that file's checkedAt date. When it fails, run scripts\check-feed-freshness.py, replace the expired feed URL (or add a documented freshness_exempt), and commit the refreshed feed-freshness.json.

Remaining data gaps

• Many rural agencies publish schedules but no open live vehicle positions. A September 2026 survey of the remaining regional operators found: SRTA (Clever Devices BusTime) and UNH Wildcat Transit (Umo IQ) require a vendor API key; MWRTA and CCRTA expose only a proprietary JSON tracker; BRTA (RouteMatch), Manchester Transit (RouteShout), and VTA (Strategic Mapping) run closed trackers with alerts-only or no GTFS-realtime; CATA and Concord Coach have no public tracker at all. Those operators remain scheduled ribbons only. WRTA and GATRA turned out to publish public Cadavl GTFS-realtime (now live). LRTA, Bangor Community Connector, Lexpress, and Harvard shuttles publish GTFS-realtime endpoints that answered with zero vehicles during the Sunday 2026-09-27 check; they are left out until a weekday decode confirms in-state vehicles.
• Peter Pan's public GTFS has not been re-published since June 2024, so its corridors are shown as scheduled service relationships rather than a current timetable.
• Metro-North train locations are estimates between realtime station predictions, not direct train GPS coordinates.
• Non-MBTA ferry operators generally publish schedules, not GTFS-realtime positions. AIS supplies actual vessel movement when a ship is broadcasting, and passenger-ship metadata is used to classify ferries when available.
• Work-zone geometry is currently strongest in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Connecticut road disruptions still appear through the CTroads incident feed rather than a uniform WZDx layer.
• Rhode Island publishes no coordinate-bearing incident or road-event feed: RIDOT's traveler page (dot.ri.gov/travel) is text only, so Rhode Island has no incident markers.
• Current GBFS coverage is Bluebikes' 13 Greater Boston municipalities plus Hartford, New Haven, and Providence. Other systems can be added as soon as they publish discoverable public feeds.
• Public truck, delivery, and company-fleet positions are generally private telematics, and there is no national public live freight-train position feed. Motion maps the public FRA rail network instead of claiming scheduled or live freight locations it cannot verify.
• Flock/ALPR camera locations and live emergency-responder positions are not collected. Motion uses official public traffic cameras and public 511 incidents without turning the map into a surveillance or responder-tracking tool.

Built by Max Howe — github.com/mapzimus