SIRI - Trouble with TRAX

[James Mineau]

Hello,

My name is James Mineau and I am part of the research team at the U of U with air quality sensors on TRAX and the eBuses. We are trying to write an internal app to display the locations of the vehicles that have our sensors on them. This way, we can diagnose whether a data outage is because the vehicle is off or if its something on our end.

We don't seem to have trouble locating the eBus vehicles with a call like:

http://api.rideuta.com/SIRI/SIRI.svc/VehicleMonitor/ByVehicle?vehicle=<vehicle_id>&onwardcalls=false&usertoken=<token>

where <vehicle_id> is the id of the vehicle and <token> is my api token.

or even the whole route:

http://api.rideuta.com/SIRI/SIRI.svc/VehicleMonitor/ByRoute?route=1&onwardcalls=false&usertoken=<token>

However a call like:

http://api.rideuta.com/SIRI/SIRI.svc/VehicleMonitor/ByRoute?route=703&onwardcalls=false&usertoken=<token>

as I believe 703 to be the red line, will only ever return a vehicle if it is at the end of the line. Vehicles currently transecting the line are not able to be called.

This behavior is also seen in the transit tracker app, which uses the SIRI interface as well.

The UTA-partnered app Transit, does not seem to have this problem, so must be accessing the some other way.

Please let me know if this is a bug that can be addressed or if I am doing something wrong.

Thank you,

James Mineau

[Jacob Whitecotton]

Hello James,

    When processing this SIRI data for Catenary Maps, I came across the same issue, and if you look back in this group, it seems to be a known issue that UTA claims to have fixed. While I have not found a solution to this problem as it seems like an issue only UTA can fix, I do have a suggestion to help process whatever data you do come across.
    The "/SIRI/SIRI.svc/" segment of the URL seems to cause issues when attempting to retrieve the data, and someone a couple years ago in this group discovered they could replace that part with "/utartapi/". So for example, a ByRoute call on UVX would look like this:

 
"http://api.rideuta.com/utartapi/VehicleMonitor/ByRoute?route=830x&onwardcalls=true&usertoken=<token>",

or a ByVehicle call could look like this:

"https://api.rideuta.com/utartapi/VehicleMonitor/ByVehicle?vehicle=<vehicle_id>&onwardcalls=false&usertoken=<token>"

Doing this allowed my program to more easily fetch text, with a bonus of this data being in a JSON format instead of XML. Just thought I could help out since I recently did something very similar and was having troubles with actually using the data given.

I would also like to add that this issue seems to apply to ALL rail services, but its sometimes inconsistent depending on what day I checked the data.

Good Luck,

Jacob Whitecotton (he/him)

Social Media Lead

Catenary Transit Initiatives

https://CatenaryMaps.org