Science knocked out a little Bart train application a couple of nights ago for your pleasure. Bart, for those foreigners, is the inter-city train system which services San Francisco and the surrounding areas.
The application provides you with real time arrival data for any station in the Bart system. It returns data in a format suitable for reading on most web-enabled cell phones.
To use this new application, simply point your phone (or computer) web browser to:
http://www.misuse.org/transit/bart/stations
A default set of stations is given. You can remove or re-order the stations listed. You can also add new stations to your list, from the links at the bottom of the page. Bookmark the final page when you’re done creating your list – and now you can see when the trains are coming for any station you frequent!
Technically the application consumes the public XML feed from Bart.gov, which provides real-time arrival data for all Bart stations. Unlike most of the bureaucracy at Bart, the web dev guys seem totally on top of things.