Metro Times – Check DC Station Times via TXT Message

I first wrote about this here and here. But now, it’s done.

Metro Times – Get DC Metro Train Times on Any Cell Phone – FREE

Fellow residents of the DC area! No more rushing to the nearest metro station, only to find the next train is 15 minutes away! Now, all you have to do is send a plain vanilla text message with the name of the station you are heading to, and receive the times for the coming trains! And it’s FREE.

WMATA offers train times over the web. They also have a WAP version – but very few people have internet on their cell phones currently (plus WAP is usually slow as !@#$ ). Happened across an iPhone version some time ago as well. These are good solutions, but  there was no universal solution. But I realized, every phone out nowadays supports text messaging, and a large percentage use text messaging regularly (and if they don’t, it’s cheap to send individual text messages). The commands sent are simple – just the name of the station. The desired data is simple – how much time until the next train.

So play around with it. Use it. Break it (try, that is 🙂 ). Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. Tell that person sitting next to you on the metro. If they have a cell phone, any kind of cell phone, it’ll work. I promise.

And if you have any suggestions/bugs/additions, let me know, by sending me an email at zvi AT zviband DOT com or posting a comment below. Thank you!

Over the past couple days, I took it from a small applet running locally on my computer and moved it to my server, and created a pretty frontend to it (OK, the HTML is horrendous, but I wanted to get it up fast). I wasted a lot of time looking for SMS gateways so I could text the user directly instead of going through email gateways, but the cost would be too high, especially for a free service.

I had a personal issue (I hate having to wait for metro trains) that I knew many others had. There was great demand, but little to nothing in terms of supply (for the standard cell user w/o an internet plan). So I made it.