Your transit agency usually has reliable data about where its vehicles are right now. Can your bus make up that seven-minute differential? Or will that “seven minutes” turn into a ten-minute delay? Trains have to wait for other trains.Īnd when an app says your bus is running “seven minutes behind schedule” - it’s actually understating the complexity of the situation.
Public transit has a certain degree of baked-in uncertainty. Until now, public transit apps (and signs) all had one source for their departure times: the transit agency.
#An app that tells your friends your eta driver#
Could you foresee the blocked intersection? The hockey game that went into overtime, holding up the buses? The hailstorm? The stroller fiesta that required the driver to use the ramp at ten different stops? Neither could your transit agency. But it’s not your transit agency’s fault.Įven though transit agencies are the ones supplying predictions to apps like Google Maps and Transit, “predicting” ETAs isn’t a brainless game of point and shoot - extrapolating from where your bus is, and adding x-minutes. The sense of betrayal - the rottweiler fury - that results from a bad transit ETA is something we’ve all experienced.
Yet mid-walk, you’ve caught sight of something strange, out there in the distance: your bus? sailing off into the horizon? without you on board? “That’s just perfect,” you say. No matter which app you use to look up the times for public transit - at one point you’ve headed to the stop, happy as a two-tailed corgi, with plenty of time to spare before the next departure.
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