Erie residents who ride the bus now have an efficient way to plan, track, and share information about their rides.

       

The EMTA has revealed its newfound partnership with Transit, a company who developed an app to more precisely track the movements of the public transportation systems in any of their affiliated cities.

       

Transit began in an effort to improve upon public transportation tracking. Many other apps, despite best efforts to program accurate schedules, would occasionally still end up with large margins of error. Transit sought to improve this model by crowdsourcing data from its users—that is, app users actually currently traveling could provide real-time information about the locations and statuses of their mode of transportation.

       

The app is not overly complicated to encourage a user-friendly experience.

       

“As soon as you launch the app you’ll see all the nearby departures times displayed boldly, which is the information the commuter needs most,” says Transit’s director of strategy and development, Jake Sion, in an interview with WBUR News. “We think that’s what people care about on a day-to-day basis.”

       

The app comes with a list of helpful features. It shows both active and inactive bus lines, warns the user when the bus is the last on the line for the day, and allows the user to see when the next buses on the line are predicted to come by. It also includes a map feature not unlike those programmed by its competitors, Google Maps and Apple Maps.

       

“Sometimes predictions aren’t always 100 precise, so riders also have the ability to go into a map view and actually see the bus approaching on a map just like you would with an Uber,” Sion says.

       

In addition, the app also factors walking distance into the user’s total travel time in order to make sure the user reaches the bus stop on time, and even includes a feature that calculates the user’s walking pace and determines whether the user is walking fast enough or needs to hurry in order to catch their bus.

On top of that, the app contains the schedules officially posted by transportation authorities in its offline storage so that users who cannot access the Internet can still view their schedule.

Finally, Transit is working to develop a chat system where riders can connect with each other and their local transit agency. This feature is still in pilot testing.

“We’re seeing thousands of comments coming in every single week,” Sion says, “everything from riders reporting that there was an accident so their bus is delayed, to bus bunching on their stop, to inaccurate real-time information and when the bus might actually arrive. It’s really valuable.”

       

The app is not just limited to buses. In Erie, the app can be used for both the EMTA and linked up to Uber; and, in larger cities, the app can also be used to track subways, trains, and bike share systems.

       

The Transit company was started in 2012 by a team of developers based in Canada. It currently serves 156 cities across four continents.