An on-demand Telegram bot for anywhere in the UAE. Share your GPS location with one tap (no typing) and ask for:
- 🚦 Live traffic — congestion level, speeds vs free-flow, incidents, plus a live traffic map snapshot (Google-Maps-style colored roads)
- 🚌 Upcoming public transport — next departures from stops near you
- 👥 Unusually crowded places — venues busier than usual right now
It never spams. The bot only replies when you press a button. No cron jobs, no notifications.
The bot sends a Telegram keyboard button built with request_location. You tap 📍 Share my location → your phone shows the native "Allow location" prompt → tap Allow → done. You can also send a Live Location (attach → Location → Share Live Location) and the bot follows it as you move. Locations are kept for 1 hour, then forgotten.
| Data | Primary | Fallback | Last resort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traffic | TomTom (live) | HERE (live) | Waze live-map feed — keyless, unofficial, often blocked |
| Traffic map | Mapbox navigation style (live traffic colors) | TomTom static map | text only |
| Transit (Dubai) | Local RTA GTFS index — real scheduled departures, zero keys (data/rta-index.json.gz, rebuild with scripts/build-rta-index.mjs) |
Transitland, HERE Transit | Nearest stops from OpenStreetMap + official app links |
| Transit (other emirates) | HERE Transit (note: HERE signup now asks for a credit card — optional) | Local RTA index | Nearest stops from OpenStreetMap + official app links |
| Crowds | BestTime.app live foot traffic (budget-guarded) | 🔥 "Nuke option": scrape Google's "Currently X% busy" from search results — unofficial, ToS-gray, bails instantly when captcha-blocked | Estimated: POIs (Geoapify, or keyless OSM) + live congestion + time-of-day |
| Reverse geocode | Nominatim (OSM) | TomTom | offline emirate bounding boxes |
Known reality check (tested Sep 2026): Waze's web feed returns 403 for non-partners and Google captcha-blocks most non-browser scrapes — both are wired in as opportunistic attempts that fail fast into the next provider, never as something the bot depends on. Crowds and transit work with zero keys via the OSM paths.
Honesty notes: traffic and map colors are genuinely live; UAE transit times are scheduled (no UAE authority publishes an open real-time feed yet) and the bot says so; estimated crowd data is always labeled estimated.
- Telegram — talk to @BotFather →
/newbot→ copy the token. - TomTom — developer.tomtom.com → 2,500 requests/day free.
- HERE — platform.here.com → freemium ~30k transactions/month.
- Transitland — transit.land → free API key.
- BestTime — besttime.app → private API key, ~100 free credits (optional).
- Geoapify — geoapify.com → 3,000 requests/day free.
- Mapbox — mapbox.com → free static images tier (live-traffic map style).
Only BOT_TOKEN is strictly required — each missing key just disables one link in a fallback chain.
npm install
copy .dev.vars.example .dev.vars # then paste your keys in
npm run dev:poll
Open your bot in Telegram, /start, share a location, tap buttons.
npx wrangler login
npx wrangler kv namespace create PULSE_KV # optional but recommended — paste id into wrangler.toml
npx wrangler secret put BOT_TOKEN # repeat for TOMTOM_KEY, HERE_KEY, TRANSITLAND_KEY,
# BESTTIME_KEY, GEOAPIFY_KEY, MAPBOX_TOKEN, WEBHOOK_SECRET
npm run deploy
Then point Telegram at your worker (replace values):
curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot<BOT_TOKEN>/setWebhook?url=https://uae-pulse-bot.<your-subdomain>.workers.dev/webhook&secret_token=<WEBHOOK_SECRET>"
Check it: curl "https://api.telegram.org/bot<BOT_TOKEN>/getWebhookInfo"
npm run typecheck
npm test
- grammY on Cloudflare Workers (webhook) or local polling (
src/poll.ts) src/core/fallback.ts— generic provider chain (timeout / quota / error → next provider)src/core/cache.ts— Workers KV (or in-memory) read-through cache, geohash-keyed, to stretch free quotassrc/providers/*— one file per external API;src/services/*— orchestration per feature- BestTime spend is capped per month in KV; past the cap the bot silently downgrades to the estimated heuristic