Better SEPTA (Team 10-F)

Mockup schedule for Regional Rail line
Live view of favorited trains using SEPTA API

Inspiration

The current SEPTA website and mobile app are glitchy and unreliable, so we want to build a web app (for mobile or desktop) that is simple and easy to use.

What it does

Our redesign condenses information about SEPTA trains on Regional Rail into an accessible web application with useful features for commuters.

How we built it

We used Node.js and MongoDB to run our server and database, and for our prototype we are hosting on Heroku.

For the frontend, we did not use any libraries or frameworks— only straight HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

SEPTA's API is missing many essential routes, we will need to do additional research to implement certain features.

What we learned

Implementing an application based on someone else's API is not easy, and the features they think are important may not be aligned with what your goals are.

What's next for Better SEPTA

Soon we would like to enable users to receive SMS notifications for late trains, so that people without smartphones are able to access SEPTA information just as easily.