Transit’s public transportation app gets a big overhaul and $2.4M in funding | Hacker News Reader

Transit’s public transportation app gets a big overhaul and $2.4M in funding

techcrunch.com

63 pointssethbannon14 comments

It's much more entertaining and useful to read about the overhaul from Transit itself: https://medium.com/transit-app/transit-4-0-is-now-live-2329f...

This is great news. Transit's experience is the best in the field.

It's a godsend for people like me whose public transportation service doesn't have a dedicated app.

Even if your city did have a dedicated app, it's almost certainly awful.

It's too bad more transportation/government organizations weren't investing in OneBusAway.org instead. It's Open Source and was* pretty well supported.

[*] I can't speak to the current status, but my wife was the PM on the team that pulled the project from University of Washington in to Sound Transit.

I reported a bug in Transit 4.0 yesterday and got prompt response directly from the CTO, Guillaume Campagna, along with a promise of a fix.

The live bus tracking was great, but the new GO feature makes it even better.

How does Transit compare with Moovit? Should I switch from Moovit to Transit? (Moovit is at $81MM in funding according to Crunchbase and works better than Google Maps in my experience in SF)

Moovit looks pretty and I like the whole "leveling up" idea, but it was terribly inaccurate for the AC Transit routes I take most often. Transit and other apps would have live arrival times within a minute or two of each other, but Moovit would either lack information or be half a departure cycle off as often as not. I gave up trusting it and went back to Transit.

Moovit's accuracy seems to have dropped like a rock, at least in Stockholm, somewhere in the last half year or so.

swear by this app for a few years at least; great for regular home region, but have also used it on while travelling in other countries without hesitation

A-B trip planning seems a departure from their humble/minimal roots, but obv. somewhere they have to go, so good on them

Always nice to see success from startups outside of the SF/NY hotspot.

Corollary: how many developers of public transportation apps use public transportation, and how many of them use low-end public transportation where the environment and process may be totally different?

I see from the screenshots many examples of the app giving transit instructions for what is perceived to be optimal usage, but if I were say in a bad area of Chicago would that be advice I should follow?

Furthermore if children or minors were making use of this app would they be receiving the right information?

I'm not trying to bash the app, it's cool, but it has me thinking..

Then somebody in the media brands your feature the "avoid black people button". Not the kind of publicity I want, personally.

Are buses inherently different in a 'bad area' of Chicago than in Montreal?

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