You're in a dark, noisy bar, doing your bit to support the local economy. It's half past midnight.
Do you have time for another drink? Or are you about to miss the last bus, subway, train or trolley?
Inspired by isepta, septime provides information about the next five departures from any stop mentioned in SEPTA's online schedules.
septime formats its output in a way that even the simplest of Internet-enabled cell phones and similar devices can handle (*).
septime results can be bookmarked and we strongly recommend using it in that way. (Yes, you can bookmark things on your cheap little phone's web browser. That little phone is a rock star. Trust me on this.) Returning to the bookmark later will once again display upcoming departures without the need to key in any new information. Convenient, no?
SEPTA provides an automated voice response system at 215-580-7800 which also provides departure times for any given stop. Their system includes more stops; this site is a lot more convenient in a noisy bar. There is also something to be said for paper schedules. Choose what works for you.
septime knows only what SEPTA's online schedules provide in text form. Sometimes they are lacking plaintext equivalents for some of the stop labels, which prevents septime from displaying the names of those stops.
septime is in beta test. Use septime at your own risk.
Fellow coders: yes, the raw data is available. I plan to update it regularly. It's on the big side, so please download it on a sensible schedule, absolutely not more than once a day. You can download the XML data here (ZIPped due to the large size of the original, and due to the tendency of Firefox to die while trying to parse large XML files directly). The DTD is also available. Sure, it's a bit grandiose to propose a DTD for scraped transit data, but we have to start somewhere.
septime was designed by Tom Boutell of P'unk Avenue.
(*) Well... okay, so it doesn't do old-school WAP from the days when HTML of any kind was not supported. But that was at least two generations of free phone upgrades ago, even at the very low end.
Unofficial SEPTA schedule information: the next five departures from any stop on any SEPTA route