You might remember MYmta, and maybe you loved it, but it was impossible to maintain. The Digital Services team at the MTA + Axon Vibe + many others contributed to relaunching the official MTA app with new features based on user feedback.
Let us know what you think!
- Going from the beta to the prod app erases all of my favorites
- many stations (like Atlantic Ave-Barclays) have to be added two or three times under favorites
- under nearby, each bus location is listed twice (one per direction, cluttering up the list)
- would love to see a view that showed me all trains from the nearest N (three? let me pick) stations, so I could decide which one to walk to — currently have to swipe/tap back and forth between multiple screens (which typically lose state/position)
- in settings, two menu items refer to AAR. I am sure 90% of the users don't know that's "Access-a-Ride"; there's also no way to turn that off for the people who don't use it
- contact us isn't integrated into SalesForce, so you have to re-enter your contact info each time, and there's no way to follow up on tickets from the app
- would be nice to have live chat to customer service (like you can via WhatsApp)
- if you enter text into the search field, then shrink the window height by dragging it to the bottom, you lose your search field contents
Product-wise, you are still structuring this around the physical infrastructure (what's at station XYZ) vs the user need (how do I get to place ABC).
Hopefully you'll bundle TrainTime in soon, as well as add OMNY card management.
It is amazing (but not surprising) that MyMTA (which is ≈6 years old) was "unmaintainble" and had to be thrown out. Can't decide if it was because the city only paid $40K/year and couldn't hire anyone good or because they paid some consultant who is friends with DOITT staff $5MM/year.
(There are some annoying technical kinks with this that I'm still trying to iron out, but maybe someone will find it useful in the meantime!)
[0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Dead Comment
https://new.mta.info/privacy-policy
As a transit provider, they seem to be offering the option to report detailed location data for a “smart alerts” feature provided by subcontract to a third party. My walking speed is relevant to predictive alerting for transit, given the non-uniform distribution of US transit, so it makes sense that personalized fitness data is a thing. (I don’t approve of doing so server-side — that particular function should be device-local.) I also assume, unverified as I’m not in their city, that their transit improvement option may also use it. (See below.)
They explicitly do not use your data for marketing. It’s a clearly written policy with full declarations in most respects. However —
App authors, please update your privacy policy to explicitly describe how and which fitness data is collected and used? I’m having to make inferences and that’s understandable but will need to be corrected.
And selling it to the highest, second highest, third highest and lowest bidders, only then can you truly devlop a great user experience.
I find the NYC public transit system to be one of the most interesting in the world. Beyond the subways and LIRR and Metro North (which are covered by the MTA's app), there are literally dozens of other transit providers: Nassau bus, red bus, Suffolk bus, NJT, PATH, HBLR, Roosevelt Island Tram, and a shocking number of smaller targeted transit providers, as well as specialized transit modes like Citibike. No app, except maybe Citymapper, comes close to representing it all.
But Citymapper was acquired, by Via. A company who makes money when you don't choose public/mass transit. So that doesn't make me feel too good. Also, Citymapper doesn't work well offline.
Another important thing is that accessibility and alerts are regarded as very 2nd rate citizens on other apps, and for various reasons, I think these should be easier to see.
Enter my little tool. It has a long way to go, it doesn't do navigation very well (it's my own implementation of a weak algorithm), and doesn't work across modalities. But it does tell you the upcoming trains at stations (using the real time data), along with all the accessibility info, and alerts for the station and line. And links to complex maps, neighborhood maps, and more. And it can map schedules for the entire network 30 minutes into the future (2 hours for LIRR and Metro North), meaning you can go into airplane mode and it will keep working. Additionally, I have found it updates faster than other apps, as it is continually polling the MTA APIs.
This is great.
Dead Comment
[0] https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/tfl-go-live-tube-bus-rail/id14...
However, a friend who was briefly visiting London found this quite confusing as it wasn’t focused on navigation. Separately, I find the UI far too information-sparse for my taste compared to some other official apps (Zurich, Prague, etc.) which makes it somewhat inefficient to use, but perhaps this works for some.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/au/app/opal-travel/id941006607
I really hope one day one of these city transport organisations either buy it out, push for it, or license their tech.
[0] https://citymapper.com/
Now that the MTA app is so good and has achieved feature parity with Citymapper, I prefer that for 90% of the time. It doesn't have multi-modal (eg subway + citibike) and doesn't show estimates of uber/lyft prices, but those have not been very useful in my experience.
Citymapper is still ok to quickly check upcoming train or bus departures.
https://citymapper.com/news/2582/citymapper-joins-via
Knowing how they are using the data from citymapper, I've since uninstalled it.
i also tried looking at ‘nearby stations’ and while standing on the 34th st A platform it didn’t list the 34th st subway station at all, just a bunch of bus stops.
please let me just look at a station list instead.
It doesn't work anymore (CORS), so I guess I might as well install the app.
I use it because it opens instantly and just shows me nearby train arrival times. The other apps have always taken too long to bother checking.