Transit app partners with STM to offer real-time info for Montreal buses
Even though the winter solstice is still a few days away, thanks to last week’s inaugural snow storm, winter has officially landed in Montreal. Which is why Transit app’s newly announced partnership with the STM is truly a godsend for commuters.
Anyone who needs to take the bus as part of their daily commute can attest to the frustrations of Montreal’s erratic winter bus schedule. And waiting out that delay in the frigid sub-zero outdoors makes every minute feel like an eternity. Well fear no more!
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Transit app has announced a partnership with the STM that will deliver real-time info for Montreal buses. The beta version of the feature is now live in the city.
The Montreal-based company announced the partnership via a blog post.
“When you open Transit, you’ll see real-time departure times for every nearby bus line. No more imprecise scheduled times,” writes the company.
The blog goes on to say that the partnership involves no exchanging of money. Instead, the two companies will help each other out through the sharing of data, including:
- Transit will help the STM improve service on the ground by sharing anonymous usage data
- Transit will help the STM test their real-time data
- Transit will meet with the STM multiple times a year to discuss ways to improve the user experience
- Transit will provide the STM with support and vice versa
- The STM will help promote Transit in a variety of ways
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“STM has been working on their iBus system for years now. It was clear to them that they no longer wanted to develop and maintain their own app and instead work with 3rd party apps like ours. We’ve been in talks for a while about being the first app to integrate their new real-time data as soon as it would be ready. After an internal beta phase, they finally made it public last Thursday, although it’s still considered to be in “beta” and might experience a few hiccups from time to time,” Sam Vermette, Co-founder and CEO of Transit told MTLinTECH.
The beta period is supposed to last 3 months, and will work with the company’s previously launched crowd-sourced GO system.
Launched last December, GO gives you real-time updates on your trip while also letting you share your real-time vehicle positions with other riders. To date, GO has crowdsourced real-time data for more than 300,000 transit trips in Montreal.
“GO crowdsourcing isn’t going away. We’ll continue to collect crowdsourced data to improve our real-time predictions, and your stats and ranking will continue to update. However, the vehicle positions generated by GO will not be shared with other users while we properly merge the two datasets together,” states the blog post.
And there was much rejoicing (yaaaaaaaaay).
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