Clicking on the link above will bring up a Java applet showing a simulation of on-schedule Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system operation in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you resize or iconify Netscape, the simulation will start over from the beginning.
The simulation starts out at 60:1 time speed-up (1 minute in the schedule takes 1 second in the simulation). The schedule starts in the early morning; initially there are only a few trains running. If your machine can not keep up as more trains are added to the schedule, the speed-up factor will ramp down. Outside the morning and evening commutes, when less trains are running, the speed will increase again.
The animation currently allows the simulation of weekday schedules. Note that the animation is an idealization; in real operation of course there are delays and trains unexpectedly going out of service, and this simulation does not take this into account.
You can enter a time to start the simulation (for example 7:15a or 5:00p). Commute hours are a good time to see the system when it really gets busy.
Trains are represented by small "rectangles" moving along the tracks, and are color-coded by which line they are running on. Trains disappear from the map when they reach their final scheduled station. The route color changes from blue to greenish-brown where the lines go underground. The scale given on the map is approximate.
Note: This simulation follows the BART February 8, 1999 weekday schedule.
Download a gzip'd tar file with all classes, images, and other supporting materials necessary to run this simulation at your computer, and which also contains the source.
Why this applet
Information is provided by the
Bay Area Transit Information Project.
The route map was adapted from an image provided by
Loren Petrich.
Support Credits
identify the funding sources and the organizational context of the work described in this document.
Please visit the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Home Page.
Distributed Systems Department Home Page.