Ghost Bus Tracker

What it is

Which Dublin buses actually show up? A 24/7 pipeline polls TFI’s GTFS-Realtime feed once a minute and classifies every scheduled Dublin Bus or Go-Ahead Ireland trip into exactly one of six honest outcomes, then publishes a public scoreboard and an open dataset from the result.

The tracker grades itself

• —Every window where the tracker’s own polling drops below 90% uptime is pulled out of the operator’s stats and counted instead as tracker downtime, in public, on the same site as the bus data.
• —A self-designed feed-health gate caught a real NTA VehiclePositions outage on its first live day, two operators’ position reporting collapsed simultaneously, and withdrew that day’s verdicts rather than publish roughly 280 false "vanished bus" accusations.
• —Two rates, never summed: a bus that vanished mid-route (direct evidence) and a bus never tracked at all (which looks identical to a dead telematics unit) are reported as separate numbers, not combined into one accusatory score.

Why it matters

Publicly grading a state service means the measurement itself has to be beyond reproach. It ran unattended on an Oracle Cloud VM until July 2026, when the provider suspended the tenancy four days into the 14-day pre-baseline window. Collection is paused, not restarted: the site shows the gap in its own uptime strip, and route rankings stay unpublished until the baseline genuinely exists.