You can avoid crowds on public transit with new, real-time crowding info

Now in select Transit app cities — with more on the way 🏃‍♀️💨

April 9, 2020

Amidst the chaos, transit continues to provide an essential lifeline to riders who need to get around. Nurses, doctors, your grocery store clerk. We want to make it easier for them — and you — to avoid crowds when taking public transit. We’re now publishing crowding data from transit agencies, and have started asking more agencies to contribute this info.

Every Transit-supported city with the data is live: Sydney 🇦🇺; Auckland 🇳🇿; Springfield, MA 🇺🇸; Modesto, CA 🇺🇸; Akron, OH 🇺🇸; Erie, PA 🇺🇸; MBTA in Boston 🇺🇸; MTA buses in New York 🗽; and 15+ more.

When you ride public transit, many of the vehicles are outfitted with passenger counters on the doors. Just like a retail store measures foot traffic to improve sales, transit agencies take passenger counts to see which routes are busiest, and when.

This helps them improve service 📊 and set their budgets 🏛.

Any transit agency that has real-time passenger counters (or similar technology) can add crowding to their feed and it will show up in Transit. This will help millions of riders make more informed decisions about when to ride.

Real-time crowding information is one of many projects we’ve launched at Transit to help riders and transit agencies cope:

We’re updating riders on pandemic-related service changes, with localized in-app banners.
We’re in constant touch with transit agencies, and helping them identify ridership trends (more on that soon…)
We’re publishing real-time Transit stats to track which agencies are most affected, and how rush hour peaks have changed in those cities.

This is a tremendously tough time for everyone. We’re doing the best we can to support our agency partners, and those riders who continue to rely on our app every day.

For the rest of y’all — when things go back to normal 🤞 we’ll have a bunch new whistles n’ bells for you to try out. Until then, stay home if you can, take care of one another, savour the small things: sun. sleep. bike rides. bagels.

We’ll be ready when you are. Stay safe. Hang tight. 🤙

You can download Transit on both iOS and Android.

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