San Francisco’s real-time transit data just went offline. So we’re going live.

Real-time transit info is super important. It gives commuters a better idea on when their bus/streetcar/subway is going to show up. In Canada (where we’re from), knowing that your bus is going to be 30 minutes late can be the difference between:

1. being late for work, or
2. never going to work again because your body froze into an iceberg

In foggy San Francisco, waiting for the bus is still super annoying. Even more annoying when you have no idea when (or if) it will ever arrive. Muni riders are pretty angry already. So instead of letting our foggy friends suffer for weeks, deprived of their beloved data, we’re rolling out a new, smart, quick, sexy and super easy way to get real-time departure info for Muni.

A quick tech fix for the quick tech city

In December we launched the world’s first (good) crowdsourced real-time transit data tracker. Wow that is a lot of words but don’t worry it’s simple:

• You download our app
• You plan a trip (or just pick your route) and tap “GO”
• Our app will detect once your vehicle has departed
• We’ll then broadcast your anonymized location data (using a tiny bit of mobile data) and make precise departure predictions all the way down the line to fellow riders.
• Yep it’s that simple.

While our app is live in 125+ metro areas, our crowdsourcing pilot was only available in two cities — Victoria, BC and Montreal (our hometown). Since launching, we’ve seen pretty cool things happening:

Today we’re excited and proud to launch our third city: San Francisco. Not that we planned it or anything. Literally we just decided an hour ago to do this because somebody asked us to go live and we said “cool okay.”

cool okay

— Transit (@transitapp) January 6, 2017

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you might miss it.

Same goes for your bus. But we can help you with that: transitapp.com/download