Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 120 posts

Re: How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters

#4

Post by state_machine »

I can see why the MTA wouldn't want you telling people to go to a track before it is actually assigned -- if the train ends up on a different track, now you need to get all those people back up, off that platform an on to the new one, clogging stairs that that people who actually wanted that platform might be trying to use too. Obviously it would be nice to assign tracks earlier, so that people can head straight to the right platform, but sending people to potentially the wrong platform seems even worse.

EDIT: Penn is extremely platform/track constrained -- NJ Transit, LIRR and Amtrak are all sharing a fixed number of platforms, some of which are too short.

To maximize platform utilization, they have to wait until the last minute to finalize track assignments -- if you reserve one too early and the train ends up late, you're wasting an empty platform. Once you send a horde of people to a platform, moving them to a different one is a challenge (stairs/bottlenecks, communication, etc).

Re: How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters

#5

Post by lukegb »

As an interesting, although unrelated aside: platform data is available in the UK's National Rail's feeds, but the terms and conditions[1] explicitly prohibit displaying platform numbers early, as mentioned in their developer guidelines[2].

I guess the wording doesn't technically ban you from displaying historical platform information, but that would likely be a bad-faith use of the data anyway...

[1] http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/Terms_and_Con...

[2] http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/documents/Developer_Gui... "Occasionally Time-Bound Data will become available through NRE feeds before it is ready to be published to the public. [...] One such example of Time-Bound Data is platform numbers. Early display of platform numbers, particularly at origin and destination stations, can lead to platform overcrowding and/or staff not having sufficient time to prepare the train for oncoming passengers. In some instances, platform numbers will be available in Darwin before being displayed on screens in stations."

Re: How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters

#6

Post by parm289 »

mjmasn wrote: post #2

Would have been interesting to see if you could reliably crowd-source the data from commuters themselves.

Was going to post this - have users submit the track data! That also might make it easier to expand to other stations where you aren't as familiar with the track layout.

Re: How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters

#8

Post by dmurray »

mjmasn wrote: post #2

Would have been interesting to see if you could reliably crowd-source the data from commuters themselves.

Google almost certainly already could, without even asking the commuters, since they have real time location for so many Android phones. But there's a chicken and egg problem: it's hard to get the data before you're able to offer anything in return.

Re: How MTA shut down my app for Penn Station commuters

#9

Post by falcolas »

Scraping the MTA site against the TOS, and intentionally obfuscating requests to limit the chance of the MTA identifying and shutting it down? Yeah, no surprises here.

EDIT: Oops, missed that he didn't end up going live with the scraping.

It would still be great for the MTA to publish this data intentionally; but I'm sure the potential for trains to switch tracks and the associated backlash when they do is what prevents them from doing it.

Perhaps they could adopt the airline model, where there's a best effort to reach a particular pre-announced track, with notifications ringing out when they can't.

Post reply on HN