Data source

Where all of it comes from

Name: Tuscan public transport timetables and real-time positions
Creator: Regione Toscana
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

DoveBus produces no data of its own. It reads open data published by others, cross-refers it and draws it. This page says which data, whose it is and under what licence — because that is a condition of those licences before it is a courtesy.

The sources, one by one.

Timetables and scheduled trips

Regione Toscana GTFS format CC BY 4.0

The official timetable for road public transport: lines, trips, stops, service days and the shape every trip has to follow. It is what lets DoveBus say which line a vehicle is, where it is heading and which road it will take. Published on the dati.toscana.it portal.

Real-time positions, delays and cancellations

Regione Toscana GTFS-RT format CC BY 4.0

The stream that makes the map live: where each vehicle is, when it said so, how late it is running and which trips have been cancelled. It is republished in full roughly every two minutes. It is the same data that feeds the official channels, read straight from the source — the route it takes to reach the map is told in full elsewhere.

Boundaries of the Tuscan municipalities

openpolis / ISTAT GeoJSON format CC BY 4.0

This is what makes the town-to-town search possible: every stop in the timetable is assigned to the municipality it geometrically falls in, so that “Siena → Poggibonsi” becomes a question you can ask. The administrative boundaries are ISTAT's and are redistributed by openpolis under the same licence.

Background cartography

OpenStreetMap OpenMapTiles · OpenFreeMap ODbL

The roads, towns and coastline under the vehicles come from OpenStreetMap, in the OpenMapTiles schema, served by OpenFreeMap without access keys. If that service does not answer, the map falls back to CARTO's cartography, still on OpenStreetMap data: the tile provider changes, the data underneath does not.

Data: Regione Toscana — dati.toscana.it (CC BY 4.0)

What DoveBus adds.

Nothing measured. All the work is in putting together sources that are born separate.

The join between real time and timetable: A vehicle in the real-time stream is an identifier, not a line. Linking it to its trip in the timetable is what gives it a number, a destination and a route.
The search between two towns: It does not exist in the source data: it comes from assigning every stop to its municipality and looking for the trips that touch two of them in the right order.
The age of every position: The data carries the time it was recorded. Turning that into a number that climbs while you watch the screen is a product decision, not something the source says.
The trail along the road: The positions received are laid onto the trip's published shape, to reconstruct the stretch already covered along the real bends of the road.

You can use them too.

The CC BY 4.0 licences expressly allow this data to be reused, including to make a derived product like this one, on one condition: cite the source. DoveBus cites it at the foot of every page, inside the application and above, in the exact form Regione Toscana asks for.

If you want to start from the same data, the entry point is Regione Toscana's open data portal: dati.toscana.it. GTFS and GTFS-RT are open, documented standards, not a local invention.

DoveBus itself is listed as a reuse case in Italy's national open data catalogue, on dati.gov.it, linked to the two regional datasets it is built from.

DoveBus is an independent, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with Autolinee Toscane or with Regione Toscana, does not represent them and does not speak for them. For official information about timetables, tickets and disruptions, the service operator remains the place to go.

A mistake on this page is a licensing problem, not only a content one: if something is attributed wrongly, say so and it gets corrected.