BART Scheduler

PLEASE NOTE! The BART Scheduler Palm application is no longer maintained as of January 2004, and the schedules posted below are well out of date.

For an actively maintained schedule application, you may consider BART's own QuickPlanner although it is unfortunately not open source.

BART Scheduler is a Palm app that finds the times for BART trains, given source and destination stations and an approximate time to leave or arrive.

Here are the requisite screen shots:

Features

BART Scheduler works in a similar fashion to the form-based online scheduler at www.bart.gov. It has the following features:

It defaults to the current time, and type of day it is today (i.e. either "Weekday", "Saturday" or "Sunday" schedules depending on the current date)
If you specify the time on on the first screen and tap "Find Trains" it then displays three or four trains before the time you specify, plus three or four trains after it.
If you tap on one of the times, it gives you more info about that train schedule, including train destination.
At the bottom of the station selection screen, you can enter the first few letters of the station using Graffiti or tapping the keyboard. This brings you to the section of the list beginning with those letters.

Note: If you get odd results, check whether it's set to "Weekday", "Saturday" or "Sunday". Sunday's schedule begins around 8 or 9am, so if you checked for 8am times, the earliest you'd get is after 8am (instead of the usual two trains ahead of 8am).

Download

Version 1.4.4 is the latest version and was released July 5, 2003. This version includes several user interface enhancements over version 1.3b2, including support for user time and date format preferences. It also includes a tweak to the results formatting that is necessary for correct results when used with the new (SFO extension) schedules.

For the latest fares effective 1/1/04, please download and install the schedule database update after downloading and installing the application contained in this file:

bart-scheduler-ns-1.4.4.zip

Source code is also available for those who are interested:

bart-scheduler-1.4.4.zip
bart-scheduler-1.4.4.tar.gz

Please post bug reports and feature suggestions on the project page. Other comments may be sent to xwittman@sourceforge.net.ignore.com.

If you need help with downloading files, pdaMD.com has a very good guide.

Schedule Database Update

The current database release is for the new fares effective January 1, 2004. The train schedules themselves have not changed since June 22, 2003. You can determine if you need to update by checking the date in the "About BART Scheduler" window. To update, install the file below the same way you installed BART Scheduler itself. There is no need to delete the previous version.

These schedules should only be used with BART Scheduler version 1.4.3 and up. Previous versions of BART Scheduler contain a bug that can result in incorrect output in rare instances when used with these schedules.

schedule-040101.pdb (effective 1/1/04)

License and Porting

BART Scheduler is free software and is distributed under an MIT-style license. Although the source is not terribly pretty, it was written with the intent of providing a general mechanism for train-style transit scheduling. As such, it may be useful as a basis for other similar efforts. Please see the README.src file in the source distribution if you're interested in the program internals.

Additional Links

http://www.bart.gov/: BART's homepage has almost anything you would want want to know about BART.
http://www.transitinfo.org/: Find schedules and other information on virtually any bay area transit system on the Transit Info page.
Caltrain Schedule for Palm OS: This is an application like BART Scheduler, but for (you guessed it) CalTrain.
BART Scheduler project page on SourceForge: Go here if you'd like to browse the source, or submit bug reports or feature requests.

last revised 7/5/03