TfL BikePoint Cacher

TfL provides endpoints for data feeds relating to the Santandar Cycles through their Unified API. The available endpoints are,

/BikePoint
/Place
/Journey
/AccidentStats

You can also download historical journey information which includes,

- Journey ID
- Bike ID
- Start date
- Start time
- End date
- End time
- Start docking station
- Start docking station ID
- End docking station
- End docking station ID 

However, you can't download historical information on the number of available bikes, and docking stations. This information is only available through the Unified API but provides only the current values.

This library was created to be able to continuously call the TfL /BikePoint endpoint, and save the NbBikes, NbDocks, and NbEmptyDocks values to a permanent cloud storage (in this case Google Drive).

I will be running this cacher, uploading the data to a dedicated Google Drive account, and making this data available through a link which will shortly be posted on this GitHub repository.

Install

1. Install using setuptools,

git clone https://github.com/aa-morgan/tfl-bikepoint-cacher.git
cd tfl-bikepoint-cacher
python setup.py install

2. Setup authorisation for Google Drive,

   • Go to credentials page
   • Click Create credentials, choose type OAuth client ID and application type Other
   • Under OAuth 2.0 client IDs download the credentials file
   • Rename credentials file to credentials.json
   • Place credentials.json in the config/ directory

3. Obtain an api_id and api_key from the (TfL developer site), and copy them into the config/config.txt configuration file.

4. The first time you run this code you will be prompted to grant access to your Google Drive. Once granted, a token.json file will appear in the config/ directory. This step fails if you run the code through a Jupyter notebook, therefore in order to obtain the token.json file you must run the Python script,

python bikepoint_cacher.py

5. You will also be required to enable the Drive API. The first time you run bikepoint_cacher.py an error message will appear containing a URL to enable this API. Wait 1-2 minutes then run the code again and it should work.

Basic usage

Import library,

from bikepointcacher import BikePointCacher, mkdir_GDrive

Define filepath for config.txt,

config_filepath = '../config/config.txt'

Create remote Google Drive folder,

remote_folder_path = 'TfL_bikepoint_cache'
remote_folder_id = mkdir_GDrive(config_filepath, remote_folder_path)

Instantiate BikePointCacher object,

cacher = BikePointCacher(config_filepath, remote_folder_id)

Start BikePointCacher,

cacher.start()

Version information

Library	Version
Python	3.6.1 64bit [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.0 (clang-600.0.57)]
IPython	5.3.0
OS	Darwin 17.4.0 x86_64 i386 64bit
attr	17.4.0
matplotlib	2.0.2
numba	0.35.0
numpy	1.14.3
scipy	1.00.0
sympy	1.0
tqdm	4.15.0
version_information	1.0.3