TrainLogic.net wants to make your SEPTA experience better

Yuriy Yakimenko isn’t from Philadelphia but the graduate student at Rutgers University has joined a growing class of tech heads in the region who have launched products they say make using SEPTA easier.
There was SEPTA Made Better, then the widely trumpeted iSEPTA, and now Hamilton, N.J.-based TrainLogic.net is celebrating the one-year anniversary of TrainSchedule, an application that can plan train trips on SEPTA and other mass transit agencies on your mobile device.
While SEPTA schedules came online last spring, the Philly version has matured and represents well the site’s mission of hastening the transition of transit to a friendlier, paperless world. Not bad for a student from New Jersey.
“I did all this in my free time, mostly during the winter and summer breaks,” Yakimenko said.
See a gnarly simulation of SEPTA train-use during the course of an average day.
“TrainSchedule is capable of planning trips involving up to two connections. It also does not require adevice to be connected to the Internet all the time,” Yakimenko, 36, said. “Also, it’s probably the only mobile app that aggregates data from Septa, PATCO, NJT, PATH, LIRR, Metro North and others into a single network, so it’s possible to plan trips that involve multiple railroads.”
TrainLogic.net offers six-month memberships for $6.95. Below hear Yakimenko explain how TrainSchedule works.
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While the application can’t work on iPhones, which don’t support Java, Yakimenko said, TrainSchedule does work on any BlackBerry, Nokia or Sony Ericsson, among many others.
Yakimenko is primarily a New Jersey Transit rider, using its NEC line, so he launched his site with N.J.T schedules one year ago, but he said SEPTA was a natural second choice in May 2008: it was a major urban-based transit agency and, turns out, simple to integrate.
“SEPTA has schedules online that are fairly easy, compared to many others, to scrape, and it’s geographically close to NJT,” he said. A mission of his was to connect the multiple transit agencies from Philly to New York.
“I know about SEPTA not being very cooperative with independent developers,” Yakimenko said. “Frankly, I never expect the government-sponsored agencies to be very cooperative at all. The only way to make them do something has to come from the top, the state government.”
He does take issue with Google’s recent attempts to play the middle-man between transit and rider.
“I can say I don’t understand why Google gets many agencies to provide their schedules in GTFS format, often on an exclusive basis,” he said. “Employees in these agencies are paid by our tax dollars, yet they often provide the information to Google, a private company, and no one else. Other developers are left out and often cannot access this information in a timely matter, even though it exists and does not contain any sensitive information.”
Dealing with those large bureaucratic transit agencies with complex route systems led to some nifty innovation for his algorithm construction.
“For example, the ‘shortest path’ algorithm used to calculate the optimal route between two points for GPS navigation does not apply to transit schedules. I had to invent an entirely different approach how to do this,” he said.
Yakimenko worked nearly a decade with Alk.com, a Princeton, N.J.-based company that makes transportation and GPS navigation software. He is a one-man operation, set aside a Web editor and a friend who volunteers to test the application on various train routes.
“The idea to make this application came to me when I started commuting by train to the university campus in Newark in fall 2007,” Yakimenko said. “I am using my application myself almost on a daily basis.”