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http://developer.trimet.org/
Here's a limit to the value of the current 0.1 implementation of @BerkeleyBART: If I get a tweet when a train is arriving, that's too late for me to take any action on that, unless I'm at the faregate, in which case I'm within range of the audible automated announcement.
What I really would want would be a bookmarkable slim mobile-friendly page with the predicted next few arrival times for a given station and direction; there's a couple of corner cases in which two stations would be reasonable choices, and which way I start walking/biking will depend on the prediction (i.e. Oakland's chinatown, halfway between Lake Merritt and 12th Street Stations, when there's a delay on one leg of the system the other has a fair probability of immunity).
Ideally I'd like to be able to send a message to BerkeleyBART specifying the station I'm going to, my destination line, and how far away I am in minutes, and have it reply with the # of minutes remaining. Remember to include board-a-different-train-and-change-at-MacArthur options, given the timed transfers there.
Remember, Twitter (and microblogging generally) isn't just about MicroBlogging. it's about effectively communicating information relevant to the user. So let's get past what's relevant to BART and translate it into the form we all need.
I'm in Paris at the moment and was very surprised when I took the metro - there's full 3G mobile coverage on all the metro lines I've tested.
I'm to create such of apps for Telecoms right now. Can we discuss, "offline" ?
Thanks again for the great insights.
_Marc
And how about "Bart Frisco" for downtown. "Bart Castro" for ... well, I guess that one's obvious. (I don't know the Bart system well enough to know what would be reasonable "zones" to cover.) Pick a good non-geeky name -- sorry, "bartsf" and "Tube Tracker" don't count -- and you'll start the reef.
As a BART rider, why would I want to know when a train is approaching the station? Either I'm at the station and can see for myself, or I'm on my way to the station, and I don't care. I might want to know when a station is scheduled to arrive at a station so I can plan my trip, but bart.gov already provides that on their front page, although not as a feed (which would be nice!)
As a Twitter user, there is no way I'm adding this to my feed. It would completely drown out all my friends. And, to be blunt, it's already doing that in my RSS feed from search.twitter.com.
Nice experiment, I guess, but this BART & Twitter user would love it if you turned it off.
How about the merger of the Southern Pacific Railroads Communications Corp to form what we now know as:
SPRINT Southern Pacific Railroad Intercontinental Network of Telecommunications
It's easier to build a wide area network when you have "access rights" across a large area to
either laydown lines or put up wireless/mircowave towers.
Enron also took a run at Internet networking since they have so many powerlines to leverage for a new business.
http://isepta.org/
for travel planning I'd expect that you'd want to alert when the train is almost in Berkeley; I don't know what the almost metric is - it would depend on where you are - but knowing that the train is 10 or 15 minutes away so that you can hoof it is perhaps more usable on the street than knowing that it just left.
But I wouldn't call what they have for real-time arrivals an API, rather a feed. Portland's TriMet has an API for their arrival data. See this interview I conducted with their Chief Tech Officer and GIS lead: http://www.trilliumtransit.com/blog/2008/09/11/trimet-innovations-in-transit-data-publishing/
Either way, as always, a cool project Dave.