About
COTA provides real-time tracking of its buses.
This is a little mashup which takes that data from COTA and plots it on Google Maps. Choose a route from the pull down menu below and markers will appear with the latest locations of its buses. Markers will update with the latest information from COTA every 10 seconds.
On the backend is a small Go server that is populated with COTA’s GTFS data, and updates vehicle and prediction data from COTA’s GTFS-Realtime feed. It exposes an API that mimics the MBTA v3 API. The front-end uses modern JavaScript and the Google Maps Javascript API.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me.
This was based on a similar mashup I made for the MBTA back in 2009. This is version 2, released 1 June 2025. The first version of this was released on 1 June 2016, shortly after COTA made the data available.