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Plan

Data sources

Every number on PreBoard carries a label. Here is what each one means.

Live (measured)

Official airport feeds and sensors (for example airport-published wait APIs and queue sensors). We count a reading as measured only if it is under about an hour old.

Traveler reports

Anonymous reports from people in line. We combine several reports with outlier filtering, expire them after about an hour, and hide reports that other travelers flag as wrong. Repeat abuse gets a reporter ignored. We never publish who reported.

Estimated and predicted

When there is no fresh measurement we show a planning baseline for the airport's size or a model of typical waits for that hour. These are not measurements and are labeled “Estimated” or “Predicted”.

Open public data we show alongside waits

  • Airport weather: METAR/TAF from aviationweather.gov (NOAA) and active alerts from the National Weather Service (api.weather.gov). Labeled “Official observation”.
  • Customs on arrival: average CBP processing waits by hour from U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Airport Wait Times (awt.cbp.gov). Labeled “Typical, not live”.
  • Land borders: CBP Border Wait Times (bwt.cbp.gov), shown as published on /border.
  • Airport rail: MBTA V3 API (Boston Logan), BART API (SFO, OAK), MTA GTFS-realtime subway and LIRR feeds (JFK: AirTrain connections at Sutphin Blvd-Archer Av/Jamaica and Howard Beach; data obtained from MTA, redistributed from our server, cached ~90 s so it may lag MTA real time by up to ~2 minutes; not endorsed by MTA). LGA has no rail link; Q70 bus times are not shown because MTA Bus Time requires a developer key. Amtrak status at BWI, EWR, MKE and BUR comes from Amtraker, an unofficial community project built on Amtrak's public train map, and is labeled “Live (unofficial)”.
  • Not used: OSRM's public demo router (non-commercial only), Open-Meteo (commercial plan required) and OpenSky (research licence). Drive times stay caller-supplied until we add a licensed traffic source.

We cache each source (1 minute to 24 hours depending on how often it changes), identify ourselves to every provider, and show nothing instead of guessing when a source is down.

How we check ourselves

We log our leave-by estimates and compare them with later measured waits; methodology and results will be published. See which airports have live data right now.

Limits

Estimates, not guarantees. Not affiliated with TSA or any airline. Confirm bag-drop and boarding cutoffs with your airline. Found a wrong number? Flag it or write privacy@preboard.ai.