Royale celebrates five years: 200 transit agencies. Three million riders.

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Back in 2021, we launched Transit Royale, a subscription that gives users access to absolutely all the features Transit has to offer. With an app that makes navigating public transit so darn delightful and predictable, we figured that not only would some riders spring for a subscription, but lots of transit agencies would choose to make Transit their official app, instead of building their own.

Five years later, we’re proud as punch to announce that 200 agencies have chosen Transit as their official app. Between them, 3 million monthly Transit users in four different countries have access to Royale, gratis. 

Collectively, the US and Canada contingent of those 200 agencies represent over 20% of transit ridership across the two countries, and serve around 2 billion transit trips a year.

We play a role in a major chunk of those trips: in the past year, 10 million individual users opened Transit over 2.8B times (!!!) across those agencies alone. 

When we first launched Transit Royale, US transit agencies were the first to come onboard and sponsor Royale for all their riders. Five years later, the vanguardian agencies of Greater Dayton RTA, Duluth Transit Authority, and St. Louis Metro are still rollin’ with Royale, and have welcomed 160 of their compatriot agencies.

They’re joined by some headliners from our home and native land. Today, four out of Canada’s five largest transit agencies have chosen Transit as their app: Calgary Transit, Ottawa’s OC Transpo, the Toronto Transit Commission, and Metro Vancouver’s TransLink. Across the country, over half of all Canadian transit riders live in a city where Transit is their agency’s official navigation app.

All told, Transit is the official rider app for 36 of the top 100 agencies across the US and Canada. Our transit agency partners span seven of Canada’s 10 provinces, and 37 of the 50 states south of the border. 

We work across municipal borders, too: we’ve connected three counties with Oregon Cascades West Council of Governments; joined the dots across Detroit with the Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan; and delivered ticketing and real-time trip planning across six states and 15 transit agencies with NeoRide. Transit is even the go-to app for the entire states of Connecticut and Minnesota, thanks to their state departments of transportation!

We’ve also packed our valise and crossed the oceans, welcoming French agencies Châlons-en-Champagne, Blois, Rodez, and Dreux on board; as well as saying “kia ora” to an antipodean trio of Kiwi agencies — Taranaki, Otago, and Horizons in the Manawatū.

What’s behind all these heavy-hitting, border-busting partnerships?

With 1200 cities and 14 years under our belt, we’ve already ironed out the speed bumps in riders’ commutes. For many agencies, choosing Transit means meeting thousands of their riders in the app they already use every day. It means they get an app they don’t need to develop and maintain over time. It means access to our in-house coterie of app and data experts who make sure their network looks its very finest in Transit.

These last five years, we’ve kept making Transit faster and more feature-full for each and every one of our agency partners and users. We’ve been tirelessly expanding Royale and our broader platform with new app updates at least once a month, every month.

We handed riders the mic with Rate-My-Ride (which now clocks over 500,000 survey responses every day!), pioneered automatic detour detection to keep an eye on wayward vehicles, gave our app a makeover with Transit 6.0, performed data wizardry to track trains underground, put the pedal to the metal with GO Bike, let users choose their own commute hours for alerts on their actual schedules, got nostalgic with trip history, and most recently brought Transit to the group chat with shared ETAs.

Lest you thought riders were having all the fun, we also launched Terminal, our operations hub for transit agency staff; built a web trip planner that agencies can embed on their own websites, pioneered the ETA Accuracy Benchmark, advocated for better public transit alongside agencies and community activists, and made it simpler to communicate contactless payment in-app.

All while making sure we’re using the latest and greatest of the GTFS spec, of course.

Thank you to all the agencies (and riders!) that choose Transit. Because of you, we’re making life better without a car for millions of people every day.

We are eternally grateful.