At TransitScreen, our goal has always been to make it as simple as possible for people to make their daily commute decisions. That means real-time information about bus and train arrivals, as well as availability of nearby bikeshare and scootershare. Now, at long last, we’re introducing another feature to help keep commutes going smoothly: service alerts.

When we started TransitScreen, our first customers were government agencies, so logically, we thought they were going to be our main customers! We quickly learned that wasn’t going to be the case - even though real-time information is one of the best marketing tools available to transit agencies, few agencies yet have the vision to invest in improving customer experience. 

TransitScreen was started to solve a problem: the need to simplify your transportation choices by giving you a single place to find all your real-time transportation information. Until now, we’ve focused on the experience of apartment residents and employees by helping you get from point A to point B fast with a simple glance at TransitScreen while you’re on your way through the lobby of your building. We’ve saved millions of people time by increasing their awareness of their transportation choices.

In 2006, I was in San Francisco working on a graduate degree in neuroscience. San Francisco is a city that has always boasted a variety of public transportation options - multiple subways, streetcars, buses, and of course cable cars. Even 12 years ago, before Uber, Lyft, bikesharing, and e-scooters, there were a lot of choices, and I had 3 or 4 different ways to get to work.

GTFS-realtime is the emerging standard for bulk real-time transit data. If you’re at a transit agency looking to provide software developers with information to create apps like TransitScreen, you’re probably considering it!

There’s a trillion-dollar trend called the Internet of Things – simply put, this means adding small computers to physical objects, and connecting everything together over the internet so useful information can be collected. When a recent McKinsey white paper looked at every foreseeable application of this massive trend, one of the biggest impacts they found was: