I was frustrated with the existing caltrain websites / apps, so I made a super minimalist one to answer the actual question I have: how long until the next train?
If you're in SF it grabs the next southbound trains, otherwise, the next northbound.
I have a command line app for this somewhere I wrote a few years back when I was commuting on Caltrain a lot, I should dig it up and publish it. It had some extra pathfinding/fuzzy search stuff. I almost always have my bike with me and I wanted to cover the edge cases where it's faster to bike to a nearby station to catch a bullet or where you can take a train the wrong direction a stop or two for the same purpose.
I wish there a maps app that would build entire itineraries taking into account that you have a bike with you, and ideally your average expected biking speed. It's so annoying to plan any sort of multi-transit itinerary in the bay, you always have to piece things together yourself or get stuck with some nonsense that takes 30% longer than it needs to.
Of course all of this could also be resolved if we had a sane transit system with short intervals.
The public transport service in Hannover/Germany once had a screensaver that you could configure to show the next departure from your nearest station. I thought that was clever marketing. Today you probably could implement this as a web service.
In the Windows 95 days (and probably in the Windows 2000 days, and maybe also today) "all" a screensaver was was an .exe renamed to -if memory serves- .scr.
There may have been some special interface that the program being run was expected to conform to so the screensaver subsystem would invoke it, but (IIRC) a screensaver could do anything an ordinary program could do. (That was the big reason for being cautious about where/who you got your screensavers from.)
Another great similar solution is the Caltrain Companion iOS app. The main screen I use is "Arriving Trains" which uses your current location to tell you when the next trains arrive in each direction, how far along they are on their route, etc. The data is realtime.
bullet trains should be displayed in red, but I haven't tested it yet at the right time and I've been too lazy to write tests with mocked time / gps :)
I've been looking into doing this as a Home Assistant integration so I can put it in a little dashboard by the door. Can you describe how you built this a bit more? It's exactly the kind of data that should be easy to grab, but isn't.
GTFS-RT data isn't a lot of fun to work with directly, though, so I'd recommend that you use an intermediary like OneBusAway (OBA) to interpret the data and give you a nicer to use API.
I thought about this, but I've seen several times where the signs say that the train is running late, but it's actually there and leaves perfectly on time!
The schedule has been much more reliable since the electrification
I wish there a maps app that would build entire itineraries taking into account that you have a bike with you, and ideally your average expected biking speed. It's so annoying to plan any sort of multi-transit itinerary in the bay, you always have to piece things together yourself or get stuck with some nonsense that takes 30% longer than it needs to.
Of course all of this could also be resolved if we had a sane transit system with short intervals.