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Choose a Better Train With Web Scraping (hackaday.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-never-on-time-when-you-need-it-to-be dept.

szczys writes: Tired of his trains being constantly late, Eric Evenchick headed to the Via Rail (Canada's communter train service) website to find which trains had a better on-time rate. Unfortunately they only offer three days worth of data through the dropdown selections — but a bit of investigating showed the GET requests were open for about the last six months. Evenchick built a web-scraper with Python, along with a web interface that queries the resulting SQL db. The harvested data shows system-wide delays that average more than twelve minutes (mostly due to commercial rail having the right-of-way). The good that comes of this? You can now choose your train based on smallest likelihood of delay..

1 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. See Via Rail limiting the GET requests in... by Ecuador · · Score: 3, Funny

    See Via Rail limiting the GET requests in 3... 2... 1...
    Well, OK, there's the weekend ahead, perhaps Monday? :)
    In any case it does look like commuter rail is a 2nd class citizen in Canada.

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