Chris Morrell

So I have a problem.  Most of the time I bike, but every once in a while I need to catch a bus or hop on the el to get where I’m going.  Inevitably, I get there just as the train is leaving, or I wait 10 minutes in the cold ’cause I left too early.  This is usually because I don’t want to waste my time finding a schedule when there’s a chance those 3 minutes will make me miss the bus.

So my idea was a single page that had the upcoming times for all the public transportation I use.  You’d enter the routes you take (in my case the 5 and 57 buses, southbound, and the Girard blue line stop, westbound), and the page will give you a quick list of when the next trains/busses will arrive.  I’ve also thought it’d be really cool if you could put in the approximate time it takes you to get to any given stop, so if it takes me 7 minutes to get to Girard station, it will only show me trains that will arrive in 7 minutes or later).

I wrote a schedule parser this afternoon and put a little bit of interface this evening.  The parser seems to work, but I’ve done VERY minimal testing.  I know the iSepta folks said that getting 80% of the parsing done is easy, and the 20% takes some work, so I don’t know if this is a project that will ever go further than running locally on my desktop, but if there’s enough interest I’ll try to clean it up and make it live somewhere.

Here’s a quick screenshot of what I have set up right now (click to see full-resolution):

Feedback?  Is this something that other people would find useful?  Post in the comments or let me know via twitter.

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