1. GO

If you’ve been paying attention over the last few months, you know we recently released a powerful transit navigator called GO that gives you real-time updates along your trip. GO reminds you when to leave for the bus, when to get off, and if you need to hurry to make your connection — so if you’re a chronic procrastinator, narcoleptic, or just somebody without a clairvoyant sense for where your bus is: GO is a game changer.

Now, in addition to telling you when to leave for your bus, it’ll also track your bus location, broadcast it to our server, and predict accurate departure times all the way down the line.

Dat’s right: with just one person running GO on each vehicle, we’re able to produce accurate real-time predictions for the entire transit network.

Better yet? We don’t need you to do anything extra. You don’t have to take training or wear a lanyard that says Transit Data Specialist™. You just have to keep on using GO, which tens of thousands of you already do every day. When you use GO, we receive your exact bus location every second, which means ETAs get recalculated in real-time instead of every 1–5 minutes.

See how smoothly the vehicle icons move on the map in contrast to agency-provided real-time? It’s like tracking your Uber. No big lags. No big jumps.

Our data drinks Red Bull for breakfast…

…but transit agency data wakes up in a drunken stupor

2. Design

We’ve designed our crowdsourcing feature to appeal to your best, benevolent self. As you board a vehicle with GO running, we show you exactly how many people you’re currently helping. If you try to quit before the end of your trip, we’ll let you know how many people you’re letting down. (And yes, we’ll make you feel like a stiff if you don’t help your fellow riders.) But you’ll also feel like a freakin hero every time you push GO.

🔥👌

3. Density

Density density density. User density is key. We have more riders than any other transit app in North America, so we’re confident that our crowdsourcing initiative will work. After all — we’re not trying to build a dense community around the concept of crowdsourcing. We already are the community.

Watch out Google you’re next

Montreal, Victoria, then the world…

Crowdsourcing goes live today in Montreal and Victoria, BC. We’ll be ironing out the kinks, flapping out the creases, and exterminating all the inevitable bugs before launching crowdsourcing in every city. But why these cities to start?

Montreal : it’s our hometown, we have good rider density here, and it is the largest city in North America without any real-time data. (In the land of the data blind, the one-eyed transit app is king.)

: it’s our hometown, we have good rider density here, and it is the largest city in North America without any real-time data. (In the land of the data blind, the one-eyed transit app is king.) Victoria: because there is also no real-time data here, our rider density is obscenely high. On a given day, more than 7K of the 35K unique daily riders will open our app (or 6 people on every bus) — and rider density is the #1 determinant of whether a crowdsourced data initiative will succeed or fail

Trust us: we know crowdsourcing real-time transit data is hard — and we know a chest-thumping blog post won’t change that. But we feel we’ve put together a solid recipe: a killer navigation feature that enables passive crowdsourcing, a thoughtfully designed experience that incentivizes altruism, and millions and millions of active users in concentrated locations.

So today we switch on crowdsourcing in Montreal and Victoria. We’ll be closely monitoring how it’s used, and how accurate it is. Then, once we’ve nailed down GO crowdsourcing in our pilot cities, we’ll start rolling it out in other real-time deficient places. And then in the places where real-time sucks. And then everywhere else.

Welcome to the future. And thank you for choosing Transit. Now, get ready to launch GO, because you’ll probably make someone’s day. Then, on your way home, someone else is gonna make yours.