Imagine you had a world map where you could zoom in on streets and railway lines and see the buses and the trains moving. A German university has made the dream come true with a portal that shows public transport in Tokyo and many other world cities. Travic, short for Transit Visualisation Client, uses published timetables from transport companies round the globe to create its live tracker. It's peculiarly absorbing to stare at a city and see Travic's little discs skid along the roads.
There's a host of smartphone apps that provide train schedules, but Travic is something else, visualising a public transport network.
The University of Freiburg in Germany says that wherever real-time data is available, it is also included in the visualisation, though not many operators offer that.The website, hosted at tracker.geops.ch, simulates the real time transit of trains and buses across Europe, North America, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Not only does it look cool, but it could be helpful if you need to see if that train you're waiting on is just around the bend or kilometres away.