🚇 Amsterdam Metro Live
Live site: amsterdammetro.nl — a 3D, orbitable map of Amsterdam's GVB metro with real trains on real track geometry, in real time.
Built in the spirit of londonunderground.live 🇬🇧 — but for Amsterdam 🇳🇱, with five map styles 🌗 and a full travel-info page 🧭 next to the live map.
✨ What it does
- 🚈 Live trains for all active GVB metro lines (50–54), positioned every few seconds from real GTFS-realtime data
- 🛤️ Real track geometry — trains ride the actual curves of the rails, not straight lines between stations
- 🏙️ 3D buildings rendered from vector tiles, with an orbitable, pitchable camera (right-drag to spin around the city)
- ✅ Confirmed stops: where the signalling system reports a train at or heading to a station, that bounds its position; trains known only from the timetable are drawn fainter
- ⚠️ GVB service messages for the metro on the map, the station cards and the travel page, in Dutch or English
- ♿ Accessible (aiming at WCAG 2.2 AA): a text-version link as the first Tab stop, a station picker that needs no map, trains followable from the departure list, zoom and compass buttons instead of dragging, respect for "reduce motion", and spoken service messages
- 🌐 Dutch and English, switchable from the menu and the travel page header
- ⏱️ Live delays — see which trains are running late, straight from the same feed GVB itself uses
- 🚉 Click a station for a live departure board — next 8 trains, headsign, and countdown — with a link to its full travel info
- 🎯 Click a train to follow it with the camera; its card shows the next stop, delay, arrival time and platform number, with a close button to stop. A tap on empty map stops following too
- 💫 Fading motion trails behind every train, so movement reads at a glance
- 🌗 Five map styles: Liberty, Bright, Licht, Donker and Fiord. Each one drives the whole light or dark look, and your pick is remembered across visits
- 🎬 Opens with a cinematic fly-in, landing right on the busiest, most building-dense part of the network
🧭 Reisinformatie: the travel-info page
A second page at amsterdammetro.nl/reisinfo, loaded only when you open it, so the map stays lean:
- 🕐 Vertrekstaat: departures per station, grouped by direction. It shows delays, cancelled runs, stops left and arrival at the terminus, with a 15–120 minute window and a walking-time filter
- 🔢 Platform numbers from the timetable: on the direction card, or per departure when a direction uses several platforms. The big interchanges (CS, Zuid, Sloterdijk…) have none in the official data, so none are shown there
- 🗺️ Reisplanner: direct and one-transfer journeys. The departure station also appears on the board
- 🚦 Lijnen and Netwerkstatus: line diagrams with the trains running right now, plus punctuality per line
- ♿ Step-free stations: a ♿ in station lists and search, step-free status on every station card with a link to GVB's lift faults, and an "avoid stairs" option in the planner that names any station on a journey that may need stairs. A station counts as step-free only once it is checked on GVB's station page; anything unconfirmed shows as not step-free.
scripts/seed-accessibility.sh adds OpenStreetMap's tag as a hint for checking. The data is checked regularly: see docs/step-free-stations.md
- ⭐ Favourites, recent stations and shareable links (
/reisinfo?station=Noord&van=Noord&naar=Gein), kept only in your browser
- 🕰️ A Dutch station clock in Amsterdam time, and a light/dark toggle in the header
- 🔎 Smart search: "arena", "52", "cs naar zuid" or "dichtbij" for the nearest station
- ⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts (
/, F, P, ?, Esc). Letter keys can be switched off for speech-input users (WCAG 2.1.4)
- 📱 Built for phones with tabs. Going back to the map lands on the station you were viewing
🧠 How it works
Amsterdam's metro fleet — like London's — publishes no GPS positions. So instead of tracking trains directly, this app derives their position the same way londonunderground.live does for the Underground:
- 📦 GTFS static (daily, from OVapi) gives us the metro routes, stations, timetables, and true track shapes
- 📡 GTFS-realtime
tripUpdates.pb (polled every ~30s) gives live per-station arrival/departure predictions for every active trip
vehiclePositions.pb (every 20s) has no GPS for the metro, but names the stop each train was last reported at or heading toalerts.pb (every 2 min) carries GVB's KV15 service messages
- 🧮 A position solver places each train along its track shape between its last departed and next predicted station — smooth, believable, live movement
- 📤 Positions are pushed to the browser over Server-Sent Events (gzipped per client), so the map updates without polling. The browser pauses the stream in background tabs
Why a train sits where it does, and what that does and doesn't claim: docs/position-model.md.
🛠️ Stack
| Layer | Tech |
|---|
| Backend | 🐍 FastAPI (Python) — GTFS ingest, realtime poller, position solver |
| Frontend | ⚛️ React + TypeScript + Vite |
| Map & 3D | 🗺️ MapLibre + deck.gl (MapboxOverlay, PathLayer, TripsLayer) |
| Data | 🚏 OVapi / openOV (free, fair use) |
| Tiles | 🌍 OpenFreeMap (Liberty, Bright, Positron, Dark, Fiord) |
| Tests | 🧪 pytest (synthetic GTFS, no network) · Vitest + Testing Library · GitHub Actions |
🚀 Run it locally
# Backend (Python 3.12+); on Windows use .venv/Scripts/ instead of .venv/bin/
cd backend
python -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python -m uvicorn app.main:app --port 8020
# Frontend
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev # → http://localhost:5183 (proxies /api to :8020)
Tests (also run on every pull request by GitHub Actions):
cd backend && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements-dev.txt && .venv/bin/python -m pytest
cd frontend && npm test
Production preview locally (optional):
cd frontend
cp .env.production.example .env.production.local
# edit VITE_API_URL if your backend runs elsewhere
npm run build && npm run preview
Production domain: https://amsterdammetro.nl (API: https://api.amsterdammetro.nl).
First backend start downloads the national GTFS zip (~240MB, cached) and extracts the GVB metro subset — a few MB, refreshed daily.
💸 Running costs
No API keys, no paid services required:
| Item | Cost |
|---|
| Transit data (OVapi / NDOV) | Free |
| Map tiles (OpenFreeMap) | Free |
| Small VPS to host backend + frontend | ~€5–10/month |
Full breakdown (RAM, bandwidth, Render tiers): docs/costs-and-specs.md.
🙏 Credits
Full attribution: docs/attribution.md (also shown in the app sidebar).
📄 License
MIT — see LICENSE.
