Historically, transit apps (and riders) have been at the mercy of agency data.

With a good data feed, real-time locations take 10–30 seconds to update. With a bad data feed, it can take up to five minutes. It’s why sometimes your phone says a bus is one place, but your eyes say different. Which leaves you feeling frustrated.

After launching GO, we proved that we could do more than just relay agency data to riders. We could create it ourselves. Today, we’re launching it in Ottawa, and our 174+ other supported cities.

It means you can now see exactly where your bus (or train, or tram, or ferry) is in hyper-precise detail whenever a fellow rider is using GO.

In cities where real-time was once sketchy, crowdsourced GO data will make it more reliable. In cities where real-time was already decent? It just got even better. 😎

Agency data (left) vs. Transit crowdsourced data (right).

How GO works

Users tap GO to get real-time notifications for their ride. Our app tracks the real-time location of the vehicle. Then it tells the user when to leave for their stop, when to disembark, and sends adjusted ETAs if things go awry. Step-by-step directions, just like Waze.

Normally, the vehicle locations we show in Transit are pulled from an agency’s data feed. But once a rider is using GO on a bus or train, they start broadcasting their vehicle’s real-time location, second-by-second, to riders down the line. Our app replaces the vehicle location from the agency data with GO’s anonymous second-by-second data. It greatly improves the accuracy of our vehicle locations.