ovlive puts every Belgian bus, tram, metro and train on one live map

One live map for four Belgian operators

A project called ovlive reached the front page of Hacker News on 7 September 2026 with an unusually broad pitch: a single live map of all public transport in Belgium. According to the site, every bus, tram, metro and train operated by De Lijn, STIB-MIVB, TEC and NMBS appears on the map, along with realtime delays, stops and departure times.

That combination is rarer than it sounds. Belgian transit is fragmented by design: De Lijn runs buses and trams across Flanders, TEC does the same in Wallonia, STIB-MIVB operates the Brussels network, and NMBS runs the national railways. Each operator maintains its own passenger information, so a journey crossing regional lines — Antwerp through Brussels into Walloon Brabant, for instance — can involve three separate systems. ovlive collapses those into one view.

What the map covers

Coverage is nationwide. The site's regional selector lists the Brussels Capital Region alongside all ten provinces: Antwerp, East Flanders, West Flanders, Flemish Brabant and Limburg in the north, and Walloon Brabant, Hainaut, Namur, Liège and Luxembourg in the south. Rather than plotting timetable positions alone, the map is built around realtime data, so vehicles are shown with their actual delays.

The interface is Dutch-first — the domain, openbaarvervoerbelgie.be, is Dutch for "public transport Belgium" — but the site also carries a French privacy policy and a loading message rendered in Dutch, French and English, pointing to multilingual support. Standard supporting pages for an about section, FAQ, sources and attribution, privacy, terms of use and contact round out the site.

An open-data project at heart

The dedicated sources and attribution page is the clearest signal of how the map works under the hood. Aggregating four operators into one realtime view is the kind of task that only becomes practical when timetable and vehicle-position feeds are published openly, and the project's rise through Hacker News indicates the appetite that exists for tools built on top of such feeds. The operators supply the raw data; a third party assembles it into a product that none of them ships individually.

Why it matters

For passengers, the value is a single point of reference in a country where official journey information is divided along operator and regional lines. A neutral, nationwide map makes cross-operator trips easier to follow and shows the network as it actually performs, delays included, rather than as a set of disconnected timetables.

For anyone working with transport data, this is a concrete demonstration of why open data is worth publishing. Realtime feeds lower the barrier for third parties to build civic tooling, and a nationwide live map is exactly the sort of product that emerges when the underlying data is available but no single operator has the mandate to unify it. If ovlive holds up as a national-scale launch, it is well placed to become the default way to view Belgian transit — and a template for other countries where multiple operators share one network.