BART Tracker

BART Tracker reports on arriving San Francisco area BART trains in real time, using a system tray icon.

BART Tracker uses BART's new "Estimated Arrivals" or "BART System Status" feature, that reports on the current up-to-the-minute status of arriving trains at every BART station.

BART Tracker is an unofficial product provided for free; it is not distributed by BART or endorsed by BART. The BART "BA" logo and the BART train are registered trademarks of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District. BART trademarks may not be used in connection with any product or service that is not BART's, in any manner that is likely to cause confusion among customers or in any manner that disparages or discredits BART. Other products or company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

BART Tracker requires Java 6 or higher. (Tray icon support only appears in Java 6; if you're using Java 5 or earlier, you'll need to upgrade your version of Java.)

Downloading and running BART Tracker

Download BART Tracker here. BART Tracker is distributed as a .jar file; if you have Java installed, you should be able to double-click on the JAR file to launch BART Tracker. Otherwise, you can launch it from the command line like this: "java -jar bart-tracker.jar"

Configuring BART Tracker

When you launch BART Tracker, you'll need to configure it to specify which station you want to monitor and which trains you care about.

• Station: The station you want to monitor. This is the station where you intend to catch your train.
• Destinations: The final destination of the train(s) you want to catch. On BART, trains are identified by their final destination, rather than by color or letter. In this section, you're specifying which trains you want to catch.

  You can select multiple trains by holding down the Control key and clicking on multiple trains.

  Note that BART Tracker is not a BART Trip Planner and won't automatically suggest alternate trains that can get you to the same place. You need to explicitly specify which trains you want to catch. For example, if you're going to San Francisco from Berkeley, you'll want to select "Fremont", "24th St. Mission", "Millbrae", "Colma" and "Daly City" all separately.

• Ignore trains less than X minutes away: If it takes you 6 minutes to get to the station, enter "6" here, and BART Tracker will automatically disregard trains arriving in less than 6 minutes, reporting on the next arriving train instead (if any).
• Notify me at X minutes, and again at Y minutes: If you enter "9" and then "7" here, the tray icon will turn yellow when the train is 9 minutes away, and then turn red when the train is 7 minutes away. (The tray icon will make a pop-up notification balloon whenever it changes colors.)

Feedback

Feel free to e-mail dan at fabulich.com with suggestions on how to improve BART Tracker. If you find bugs, please file them in our SourceForge Bug Tracker.

If you like BART Tracker, I'd appreciate a donation.

Development

BART Tracker is publicly available under Apache License 2.0. See our BART Tracker SourceForge page for more information. The source code for BART Tracker is stored in Subversion. BART Tracker is written in Java and builds using Maven.