Essential Tools for Metro Riders

0Matt Briney • 8th Jun 2011 • Matt's Thoughts • alerts, app, Auto, Draft, feed, Home, metro, metro card, metro service, orange, Pipes, snails pace, station, station metro, status, subway, yahoo pipes

Today’s commute home on the orange line was not Metro’s finest. Backed up trains, off-loaded cars and problems at the Falls Church station was grinding the system to a snails pace. While it doesn’t happen often these are the challenges of the Metro commuter.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you knew if there was trouble on your way home or to the office before you swipe your metro card and enter the station. Metro makes system-wide rail alerts available on their website. But most riders only care about 1 or 2 lines, not the entire system.

Using the Yahoo Pipes service I have created individual alert lines for each of the Metro service lines. These take the standard RSS feed and only notify you when it’s the line you care about.

• Green Line: http://bit.ly/MetroGreenLine
• Red Line: http://bit.ly/MetroRedLine
• Yellow Line: http://bit.ly/MetroYellowLine
• Blue Line: http://bit.ly/MetroBlueLine
• Orange Line: http://bit.ly/MetroOrangeLine

You can take these feeds and plug it into the Boxcar app for your iPhone and coming soon for other mobile devices. Boxcar uses Apple’s push notification system to send you alerts from web services.

To setup an alert download the app from the app store. Then open the app. Select “Add a Service” and scroll and find the “RSS or Atom Feed” item. Give it a name and then enter one of the URLs above for the line you want to track. Then select how you want to be notified.

That’s it you’re all setup. For anyone wishing to get the above feeds in a different format (including email updates, Google alerts and JSON feeds) check out my Yahoo Pipes page.

In addition to Boxcar you will also want to check out Infomaps for the DC Metro. This allows you to see the service boards for each station before you enter the station.

Another link to save is Metro’s mobile site. It’s not graphically pretty but it’s lightweight, efficient and works on any phone with a browser. What’s nice about this page as opposed to Google Maps is that you can specify if you want to do your trip by rail, bus or both. So if metro rail has gone kaput you can go home by bus and vice versa.

This is just a selection of tools that are out there and the items that I use. If you have other please submit them in the comments below and help us all moving.

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2. TermKit: A Graphical Replacement for Terminal
3. Travel Map: Vail