Caltrain Tweets; Accident at Mountain View Station
Caltrain Tweets is a free service that uses the Twitter API to give Caltrain riders better information about events going on around them - like the accident that may have just occurred at the Mountain View Station. Here’s what the twitter-stream looks like over the last 20 minutes:
Here’s a snapshot of information from the About page:
About
This service is an attempt to address two issues many Caltrain commuters have by empowering them to send alerts themselves.
Problems
#1 No adequate method of providing travel alerts, delays, and advisories.
Caltrain does not currently provide unplanned travel alerts and advisories on their web site and 511.org, which provides information on mass transit in the San Francisco Bay Area, posts notices too infrequently to be considered useful. Even if either site were to provide up-to-date notices there is currently no way to have them sent to you either by email or SMS.
#2 Communicating the number of bicycle cars on a particular train.
An unfortunate problem commuters who bring their bikes on the train face is either being bumped from a train because the bicycle car is full or delaying the train with the boarding process.
Solution
By leveraging Twitter’s broadcast SMS feature commuters are able to send email to a designated account where the subject of the email message will be used as the Twitter update or ‘tweet’.
The Twitter account receiving the general service/alert updates is username ‘caltrain’, and can be found at http://twitter.com/caltrain.
The account with chatter about the availability of open bike spaces is username ‘bikecar’, and can be found at http://twitter.com/bikecar.
The About page also mentions that NJ Transit has the best system for sending updates - though I’m not sure what that system is.
[Update:] Cyclelicious has more. Pedestrian tried to cross the tracks and beat the train. Fatality.
Leave comment (3)[p.s. The Forums are open for participation.]
October 13th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
The NJ Transit system sends their own official alerts[2] via SMS and/or email which can be setup from their My Transit[2] section.
[1] http://www.njtransit.com/sa/sa_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=MainTo
[2] https://www.njtransit.com/mt/mt_servlet.srv?hdnPageAction=MTLoginNewTo
October 14th, 2008 at 4:44 am
cool - thanks Ravi.
makes me think it would be kind of cool to get official alerts, and then a channel to get crowdsourced info as well.
October 14th, 2008 at 10:13 am
here was a day I was unhappy to be “first on the scene”