
Choose a Better Train With Web Scraping (hackaday.com) 50
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..