Scripting News - Latest Comments in Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:54:46 -0000

In Norway (or at least the area around Oslo) all public transportation vehicles have GPS boxes that transmit their positions. The bus/train/subway/tram stop displays real time information about how long you have to wait. This information is also available on the web, xml and wap.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Scobleizer — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:11:59 -0000

I like, but Bart doesn't come anywhere near my house. I'll have to try it to come and see you sometime, though. Thanks!

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Colin Devroe — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:38:40 -0000

One thing I could recommend is sending those updates to a Brightkite location. On Brightkite I have it set up to SMS me whenever someone checks-in or posts a note/photo to a location within X feet of me. Might be more useful and I'd only get SMS updates from trains that are near me.

Either way, as always, a cool project Dave.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

sean — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:10:14 -0000

chicago cta has an api

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Ryan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:58:49 -0000

www.blipsocial.com - They added in cell tower based triangulation to give you only the trains nearby. It works on blackberrys.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

nobody — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:46:08 -0000

knowing BART and Bay Area transit in general I wouldn't set your watch by the BART API.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Aaron Antrim — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:18:01 -0000

The new BART website is great, and the really beautiful parts are under-the-hood — the real time arrival feeds and public GTFS schedule data. Love their twitter feed.

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/

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Alex — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:33:54 -0000

That's great! Too bad the MTA will never get something like this here in NYC :-(

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Ed Vielmetti — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:11:32 -0000

good idea dave.

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.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Daily Mail — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 10:32:36 -0000

what about terrorists?

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Anon — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:36:07 -0000

http://traincheck.com/ provides related functionality and does caltrain and DC metro too.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Philly Septa Rider — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:48:03 -0000

Oh yes, thanks to the boys at iSepta!!

http://isepta.org/

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

ontarioemperor — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:18:04 -0000

What has been done in this regard for airlines? Since flights between two locations are much less frequent than trains between two locations, an RSS feed of airline data may be manageable. And Lee, thanks for posting http://developer.trimet.org/ - I lived in Portland many many years ago, and it's good to see that they're taking a lead in disseminating information.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

JeffL — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:21:43 -0000

I ride BART everyday. I'm also a heavy Twitter user (@jleyser) In fact, I found BerkeleyBART when it showed up in a RSS feed I have from search.twitter.com. And this strikes me as pretty useless.

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.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Erik S. — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:50:53 -0000

There is something satisfying about this. Did you know that the 19" racks that servers and router fit into were first standardized by the railroad industry for their signalling systems?

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

$10074 — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:39:58 -0000

we have an sms version for buses based on stop numbers in our metro area, they tie into displays on the stops as well giving a count down in minutes...it's based on lbs on the buses which have a tiny gsm device, you text in the stop number, which is available on google maps, and it gives the buses for the next hour or so...

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

TM — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:09:18 -0000

"bookmarkable slim mobile-friendly page " is at bart.gov/wireless. bookmark http://bart.gov/wireless/st...

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

NYC Subway Rider — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:58:07 -0000

"Is your subway system a platform?" No. It is, however, a toilet.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Drew Kime — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:57:24 -0000

Dave, I'm surprised you picked the wrong name. I know you know how important a name is, and you're even halfway there with realizing it sounds like something from a cowboy cartoon. But "Bart" is a first name, not a last name: Bart Berkeley. Now *that's* a cowboy name.

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.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

mduchesn — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:42:15 -0000

Absolutely awesome piece of evidence of the potential uses of Twitter.
I'm to create such of apps for Telecoms right now. Can we discuss, "offline" ?
Thanks again for the great insights.
_Marc

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

Tom Morris — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:43:34 -0000

I did something like this a while back. 'bartsf' is a Twitter account I created a long time ago that gives updates about delays across the whole BART network. For London, I've also made Twitter Tube Tracker (google it) which provides similar information on delays across London's tubes. I'm also planning on adding a few selected bus routes too (probably 9, 10, 24 and 91).

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.

Re: Is your subway system a platform? (Scripting News)

raines — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:39:17 -0000

Great stuff, Dave. Believe it or not, in 1989 I was hand-entering station-by-station BART schedules into HyperCard on a 17-pound Mac Portable, towards doing exactly this sort of thing (without the realtime update component).

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.