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. Runs unattended on an Oracle Cloud VM; currently in a public 14-day pre-baseline collection window before route rankings publish.