What this is
scot.live shows public data published by third parties — transport operators, utility networks, government agencies and volunteer sensor networks — on a map, city by city. It is an independent site, free to read, funded by affiliate links — see How this is paid for. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated on behalf of any of the organisations whose data it displays.
Accuracy, and the limits of it
We make reasonable efforts to keep what is shown current and correct: sources are polled continuously, ages are shown honestly, and each city's sources page reports when every feed last answered.
But there are real limits, and they are worth stating plainly.
- Data can be out of date. Every value here originates elsewhere and reaches us on that publisher's schedule. A fuel price is filed by the retailer, not read from the sign. A timetable is the published plan, not what actually ran.
- A feed can stop without the map going blank. When a source stops answering, the map continues to show its last known state, marked as stale. It will not always be obvious at a glance.
- Some values are inferred, not observed. Train positions between stations are calculated from timings and track geometry, and are labelled as estimates wherever they appear. They are not GPS fixes.
- Absence is not evidence. An empty layer may mean nothing is happening, or that nobody publishes it, or that the feed is down. The sources page is where those three are distinguished.
- Coverage is partial. Only operators who publish open data appear. A road, vessel, aircraft or bus that is missing is not necessarily absent from the real world.
Not for safety, navigation or emergencies
Do not use this site for navigation, for marine or aviation decisions, for flood or emergency response, or for any purpose where being wrong or late matters. It is not a substitute for the official source in any of those cases — the coastguard, the Met Office, SEPA's flood line, your network operator, or 999.
The site is provided as-is and as-available, without warranty of any kind. To the extent permitted by law, we accept no liability for any loss arising from reliance on it, from errors or omissions in the data, or from the site being unavailable. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
Availability
There is no uptime commitment. The site may be unavailable for maintenance, and individual layers may be withdrawn at any time — for instance if an upstream publisher changes their terms, withdraws access, or asks us to stop.
Data licensing and attribution
Underlying data remains the property of its publishers and is used under their respective licences. Several sources are made available under the Open Government Licence v3.0; base map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors. Each city's sources page names the publisher and licence for every feed.
If you are a publisher and something here misrepresents your data, or is used outside your terms, get in touch and it will be corrected or removed.
The API is not open for reuse
The maps on this site are served by a JSON API. It is reachable over the public internet because a web page has to be able to call it — that is not an invitation to use it. It exists solely to make these maps work.
You may not, without our prior written permission:
- call the API from any site, application, product or service other than this one;
- collect, scrape, harvest, cache or store data obtained from it, whether manually or by any automated means;
- republish, redistribute, sell or otherwise make available data obtained from it, in any form, including in aggregated or derived form;
- use it to train, fine-tune or evaluate any machine-learning model;
- circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, any rate limit, access control or other technical measure protecting it — including by forging request headers, distributing requests across addresses, or routing through proxies for that purpose.
Access is rate limited per address and requests are logged. We will block traffic that breaches this section, without notice and without explanation, and we reserve every other remedy available to us.
This is not territoriality for its own sake. Several feeds reach us under credentials issued to this project, and their publishers' terms do not permit onward redistribution — so somebody pulling that data through us is using our credentials, and it is our access that gets withdrawn. The underlying data is not ours to give away.
Nearly all of it is available directly, and most of it is genuinely open. Each city's sources page names every publisher and its licence. Go to them: you will get better data, under terms that actually cover you, without depending on a small site that may be down or may change its shape next week.
If you have a use in mind that these terms do not allow, ask. A reasonable request from someone building something interesting is likely to get a yes.
How this is paid for
The site is free to read and carries no subscription. It is funded by affiliate links: where you follow one and go on to buy something, we may be paid a commission by that retailer. It costs you nothing and does not change the price you pay.
Every such link is labelled as an advert or affiliate link where it appears. If it is not labelled, it is not paid for.
Paid links never influence the data. Nothing on the map is ranked, ordered, coloured, included or left out because of a commercial relationship. The cheapest fuel shown is the cheapest fuel we have a price for, and no retailer can buy their way up that list or another's way off it. The point of this site is that it has no stake in the answer, and that is worth more than any single advertiser.
Privacy
The site itself runs no analytics, sets no advertising cookies, and builds no profile of you. Your layer choices and panel positions are stored in your own browser and never sent anywhere. The server keeps ordinary web logs, including IP addresses, for operating and protecting the service.
Affiliate links are the exception, and only once you click one. Following one takes you to the retailer's own site, which will typically set a cookie or record an identifier so the referral can be credited. That happens on their site under their privacy policy, not ours — but it happens because of a link here, so it is stated here. Do not click if you would rather it did not.
Changes
These terms may change as the project does. The current version is always the one on this page.