Tools
Three calculators that answer a question from a URL and give the same answer back as a widget and as JSON. No account, no key, no charge, and the license lets you republish what comes out.
The three tools
Ordered by what the answer is made of. The first reports what an operator published, the second files one component of five, and the third computes every figure it prints.
Ferry Finder
MeasuredWhich boats sail this route, who runs them, how long they take and what the operator charges.
Measured. Every row is one of 2,709 sailings that 120 operators published, with the departure, the crossing time, the vessel and the fare as filed. A dated snapshot, not live availability.
How long a journey really takes once you count reaching the station and waiting there.
Filed for one component of five, derived for the rest. The time in the vehicle is filed on 545 corridors and derived everywhere else, and reaching the terminal, waiting in it and the same two at the far end are always derived. A row is labeled by its in-vehicle component, never by its total.
Carbon calculator
DerivedWhat a journey costs the atmosphere, by every mode that could carry it.
Derived throughout. Each figure is one of 6 published factors multiplied by a distance worked out from two sets of coordinates. Where a mode runs the corridor the distance is the leg. Where it does not, the mode is modeled on the great-circle distance, no journey time is stated and the bar is drawn hollow.
What each answer rests on
The same three words the datasets use, because a tool is only ever as strong as the rows underneath it.
- Measured
- The operator published this value and we wrote it down. A fare, a departure, a crossing time.
- Filed
- What an operator says a service will do. A plan, checked against nothing that ran.
- Derived
- Worked out from other values. A distance between coordinates, a published gram figure applied to it, an allowance for getting to a station.
The carbon calculator labels a modeled mode on the bar itself and in the API response, and the door-to-door calculator carries a provenance line per component naming the day the operator filed for.
Three surfaces, one answer
Every tool does all three. This is what makes them worth linking rather than worth visiting once.
- A permalink that renders on the server
- The form is a plain GET, so submitting it is a navigation and the address bar holds the state. No scripting is needed to see an answer, which also means a link to an answer still works when it is pasted into an article, an email or a crawler.
- A widget you can put in your own page
- The same parameters against a chrome-free route. The attribution and the link home are inside the frame rather than something a publisher is asked to add, and each tool page prints the snippet for the state it is currently showing.
- A public JSON API
- Open without a key or a sign-up. A versioned response shape, a license in the body and in a Link header, cross-origin reads allowed, and the rate limit returned in the headers on every reply.
| Tool | Permalink | Widget | API |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ferry Finder | /tools/ferry-finder?from=ajaccio&to=toulon | /tools/ferry-finder/embed | /api/tools/ferry-finder |
| Door to door, not time in the vehicle | /tools/door-to-door?from=paris&to=london | /tools/door-to-door/embed | /api/tools/door-to-door |
| Carbon calculator | /tools/co2?from=berlin&to=prague | /tools/co2/embed | /api/tools/co2 |
The limit is 60 requests a minute per address, per instance, held in memory. It stops a script in a loop.
Using the answers
What comes out of these is CC BY 4.0, the same licence as the datasets underneath them.
Republish a figure, redraw it, put the widget in a commercial article, build a product on the API. Name Orlero and link back. That is the entire license.
An answer is only as current as the snapshot behind it, so quote the date the tool prints next to the figure rather than the day you read it.