Thankfully, one of those rare transit geniuses works for Transit. His name is Leo. Every week, Leo reads The Weekender with his morning coffee, and with a combination of automated tools 👾 and human oversight 💁 turns The Weekender’s text into data that our trip planner can use ✅

That’s right: Transit is now the first transit app to offer reliable trip suggestions for New York’s weekend transit mayhem.

Three L train alternatives that won’t send you on a wild goose chase

So no matter how messy the MTA’s service disruptions are, including…

Added service

Removed service

Altered service

Locals running on express tracks

Expresses running local

Single-direction service changes, etc.

…we’ll spare you from having to read The Weekender ever again. Which is great news for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who use our app every day. Thanks Leo!

Leo: France’s best gift to NYC since that really big statue 🙌🗽🙌

Now for some even BIGGER news:

2. 🌞 🚇⏰ Crowdsourced real-time data is now available on ALL transit lines in NYC ⏰🚇🌞

A B C D E F G…. J M N Q R W… 7 and, um, Z.

No: that’s not just our drunken attempt at the alphabet. Those are all the New York City subway lines that were without real-time information. Until 2017.

DECEMBER 2017 UPDATE: the MTA now has official real-time for all lines. Find them with our app Transit on iOS and Android.

The letter lines are taken by the majority of NYC subway riders. So why wasn’t official, agency real-time data available? Well… it’s complicated. But it doesn’t have to be.

Whenever the MTA doesn’t have real-time for a line, you can still find it on Transit. How? Because the magic of real-time crowdsourced transit data is now possible in the city that loves crowds the most: New York, New York.

Here’s how it works:

You download our app

You plan a trip (or just pick your route) and tap “ GO ”

” Our app will detect once your train has departed

We’ll then broadcast your anonymized location data (using a tiny bit of mobile data and battery) and make precise departure predictions all the way down the line to fellow riders.

Yep it’s that simple.

Finally: all New Yorkers will know when their subway is going to show up!

New York is the fourth place we’ve launched our crowdsourced data pilot. And it will probably be our best: In Montreal, Victoria, and San Francisco, we’re already generating real-time data for thousands of trips a day.

Spotted in Montreal: 3 crowdsourced vehicles coming your way.

However, those “transit trips” are mostly on buses with 60–70 people, not the 1000-person capacity trains you’re used to riding in New York.

What does that mean for New Yorkers? With 10x the riders per vehicle, you have 10x the odds of having crowdsourced departure data for your train. We’re going to help you navigate your big, wormy apple better than anyone else.