« Transit Board | Main | A Small Victory for Jim »
August 14, 2007
Transit Arrivals by TXT Message
 Arrival information for 3 lines downtown split across two SMS messages, displayed on an iPhone. |
Not everyone has a web-enabled cell phone that can use our Transit Surfer™ interface. But most cell phones can do text messages. So we have partnered with a 3rd party SMS gatgway company called 411sync to offer TriMet (route and arrival data provided by permission of TriMet) and Streetcar arrival times via text message. You get back a very terse reply, like:
Streetcar to SW Lowell and Bond: 2m,18m,34m; 15 Parkrose TC: 3m,17m
For each line at the stop, you get the line identifier, terminus and the times of the next few vehicles.
You access this service by sending a text message to 415-676-8397 or sms@411sync.com with the following message text:
trimet <stop #>
Example:
trimet 2719
Posted by Chris Smith at 12:00 AM
Comments
August 14, 2007 11:06 AM
James Says:
xrl.us provides even shorter links.
August 14, 2007 11:12 AM
Chris Smith Says:
The tinyurl piece is done by 411sync, not be us.
August 15, 2007 1:14 PM
Chris Says:
If you have an iPhone (which I do as well) why the heck would you want to do this through SMS? You have a full web browser!
I whipped up the following page to tell me exactly what I need to know to get to and from work:
http://repository.durandal.net/Content/transit.html
I'm just embedding the popups that Tri-Met gives you on their site into one page, so I can see what the options are. The individual embeds refresh as long as the phone doesn't go into standby, and if it does, that's what the page refresh button is for.
I'm sure that there's probably more dynamic and elegant ways of doing what I did here, but I'm not a web developer, and I'm certainly not going to do Tri-Met's job for them, even though this is exactly the kind of thing that keeps people from using transit - no reliable information about when the vehicles are going to arrive.
May 27, 2008 8:19 PM
Roger L. Cauvin Says:
Dadnab provides full itinerary information (not just stop times) via text messaging (SMS).
To the person who questioned why anyone would want to use SMS when they have a full web browser: think of a Post-It Note. A text message makes a better Post-It Note than a browser page, because it's stored in an inbox, and you can refer back to it easily whenever you wish.
Disclosure: I created and operate the Dadnab service.
