Passenger Bus, Rail and Motorcoach Industry News

Providing door-to-door walking and transit directions, schedules and officially licensed transit maps and, for the first time, real-time crowd-sourced information from fellow transit riders.

LIRR and Metro-North are seeking proposals from companies that can develop an app that will let customers buy tickets right on their mobile devices and display their tickets on screen for visual inspection by conductors and/or barcode verification. Responses are due by March 15.

In just less than three months, over 100,000 tickets have been purchased by more than 35,000 unique users using the ‘mTicket’ smartphone app.

Moovit allows users to contribute information about available seats, delays, cleanliness, and support for Wi-Fi and handicapped riders.

Students can view live GPS data of the location of the After Hours shuttle by downloading the free Ride Systems app for both iPhone and Droid at the school's website. The system provides the location of the shuttle updated every 10 seconds.

Removing the public transit directions feature from its new Maps application has given smaller developers a chance at increased exposure for their transit apps.

Company is looking to fill void left by Apple's Maps feature that does not include public transportation directions.

The new feature can show any bus route, where the bus is on any selected route and where it is going, with the position updated every 10 seconds.

The app, which has been in beta testing for a couple of months, lets you put in a location and immediately get back a number of routes, presented as timelines of walking, waiting and riding.

Move allows third-party developers plugging Google’s Maps product into their web and mobile applications to provide their users with public transit routes, color-coded transit layers, and schedules.