Guide

How GSRTC live bus tracking works

Behind "the bus is 4 minutes away" is a GPS unit, a public data feed, and some maths against the timetable. Here's what actually happens between the bus and your screen.

Where the position comes from

Every GSRTC bus running a scheduled trip carries a GPS unit that reports its position back to the operator's systems. That's the same raw data every live-tracking tool works from — GSRTC's own tracking page, the official app, and independent tools like ST Tracker all read the same feed rather than each running their own GPS network.

ST Tracker asks for a bus's position by its number plate, gets back a latitude and longitude, and places it on the map. It refreshes roughly every 20 seconds — a live position is only useful if it stays live, so the app keeps asking for as long as you're watching that bus.

How "4 minutes away" gets calculated

A raw GPS point on its own doesn't tell you much. ST Tracker combines it with the bus's route and timetable to work out three things: which stop it just left, how fast it's moving, and how long it should take to reach the stop you picked. When the operator's own feed already states the next stop directly, that answer wins over anything worked out locally — it's the more trustworthy number.

Not every number is shown. If the data doesn't support a confident estimate — the bus has been stationary a long time, or the delay looks larger than a real bus would ever run — the app stays quiet rather than showing a figure it can't back up. A blank field is more honest than a wrong one.

Why a bus sometimes can't be found

Live tracking only works for a bus that is actually on a trip. Three common cases show nothing to track, and none of them mean tracking is broken:

• The bus is still at the depot and hasn't started its scheduled run yet.
• The trip already finished and the bus is now parked or on standby.
• The plate was typed with a small difference from how it's registered — GSRTC plates follow a strict format, and the app corrects common punctuation differences but not a wrong digit.

For the full walkthrough on troubleshooting a bus that won't show up, see finding your ST bus's live location, step by step.

Reading the whole route, not just one point

A single position is useful, but the fuller picture — every stop on the route, which ones the bus has already reached, and the real time it reached each — is what turns "somewhere on the highway" into "past Wankaner, running about 8 minutes late." That comes from the same trip data, read stop by stop rather than as one live point. See it on the Routes screen.