Anyone who rides the PATCO with any regularity will be familiar with the schedule PDFs they post on their website. When all you want to know is "what time will the next PATCO be here?", it's always been kind of a pain to pull up whatever the current schedule is, find your station, and scan down to see the list of times. It's a very dense table with a bunch of informational banners at the bottom. Not really well-suited for reading on a phone!

As a long-time PATCO rider, this is basically just the paper schedule that they used to print out and hang up, and that they now put on the large displays at the stations.

Local developer Ryan Graf was fed up with this enough to do something about it - so meet nextpatco.fyi:

It tells you at a glance what you're probably looking for - when the next few trains will be at the station you pick.

Importantly, this takes into account any special schedules that might be currently in effect. There have been some similar sites before (like nextpat.co) but generally those don't do the same and only show the regular schedule. The reason for that is that the Port Authority doesn't make it easy to do so, but these days there have been special schedules almost every few days - so it's kind of important to know what the actual time will be!

The Port Authority provides a machine-readable dataset with the PATCO timetable in a format called GTFS. This is pretty much the standard for transit agencies providing train times for websites and applications to use. The trouble is, they don't include the special schedule times in that data. The only source of the special schedule times are those PDFs they post on the website.

So Ryan built some automation to occasionally check for special schedules, and to pull times out of the special schedule PDFs. Which isn't as straightforward as pulling times from a GTFS feed - PDFs are really meant for humans to read, not computers - but the special schedule PDFs are consistent enough that it apparently works pretty well.

It looks good in landscape too if you're on a desktop or laptop:

(If someone from PATCO is reading this - please put the special schedule data in your GTFS feeds! There is a GTFS Realtime specification for providing more timely scheduling information, including Trip Modifications. It shouldn't be necessary to attempt to parse meaningful data from the PDF schedules.)