They have changed the station signs as well! They added little "signal" icons on the longstanding "realtime" entries, the non-scheduled ones. So if it's an undecorated entry on the station signs, my impression now is that it's a scheduled/future trip. I was excited that they made the same data available in the API!
I chose to de-emphasize the newly added data (which is valuable, but imo less valuable than the longstanding data if it's present). So I'm fading things out and marking scheduled entries, rather than changing the data that has always existed.
MARTA realtime train API adds schedule data
It's rare that MARTA has changed the realtime train API. And this is definitely the biggest change I've seen in the decade I've been using it. A longstanding complaint I have gotten while maintaining marta.io is that it only includes active trips, or moving trains and their destination. On Friday I noticed that their new train API endpoint includes future, scheduled trips. I added some quick styling for them (faded pills, calendar icons), and am excited to give it a whirl next week!
I forgot to list out the current situation briefly:
- The landing page is a list of all MARTA routes, and their trips. The trips are grouped by destination/headsign.
- basic html/css, gzipped. trying to be load-able on slow connections because it's a lot of text/data
- this page is static, gotta magically know to reload to get updates rn
- You can click the route name to go to a rough "route summary" page showing vehicles + future trips seen in marta's endpoint
- this page is static, gotta magically know to reload to get updates rn
- From both pages, there are links to the individual trips which puts you on a barebones trip tracker that just updates a vehicle's position every 30s right now on a map. There are edge cases where trip isn't track-able, haven't hammered them out yet.
experimental MARTA Bus UI/UX
If you ride MARTA buses regularly, I'm slowly trying to get a UX put together that's usable at https://martalith.fly.dev. Things like:
- "I get on the same buses every day (at 2-3 stops) and just want to see my bus situation clearly/quickly"
- "I transfer at X station regularly and want to know the status of Y/Z routes for that station"
I've tried to build this in the past, and the bus data either confused me or didn't seem usable. But MARTA recently added realtime bus positions + trip update endpoints, and early tests are looking more positive! When I can find an excuse to ride buses, I'm testing things out, but it's slow-going.
I try to remember to put updates here when things change https://fosstodon.org/@jakswa