Transit

It is 8:14 a.m. The bus is late.

Somewhere in a city you have never visited, a person is standing at a corner, phone in hand, watching a small colored line crawl toward a dot that is them. They are not anxious. They know the bus is four minutes out, that the next one is twelve behind it, and that if both vanish there is a bikeshare dock around the corner. That calm is the whole product. That calm is Transit.

Transit is a free mobile app, built in Montreal, that does one stubborn thing well: it makes public transportation legible. Open it and the screen fills with every nearby line, ranked by how soon it leaves, color-coded so you can read it at a glance and in a hurry. Tap one and you get the live position of the vehicle, the walk to the stop, and a plan B that involves a bike, a scooter, a car-share, or someone else's car entirely.

It runs in more than 1,100 metropolitan areas across 34 countries. Forty-plus transit agencies, the public bodies that run the buses, officially endorse it. That last part is the unlikely bit, and we will get to why.

Transit is everywhere. Understanding it is not.

Here is the quiet scandal of public transit: the buses and trains usually run fine. What fails is the information. A schedule taped to a pole, accurate until the moment a bus idles in traffic. A PDF timetable that assumes you can read a grid while running. An agency website that loads like it is still 2009, which, in fairness, some of them are.

For most of the twentieth century, the deal with transit was simple and a little cruel: the system would tell you when it intended to arrive, and you would find out the truth by waiting in the cold. Owning a car solved that with money. The dashboard always knew where the car was, because you were sitting in it.

The founders saw a city full of perfectly good transit that nobody trusted, because trust requires information, and the information was scattered across a hundred agencies that were never going to build a great app on their own. The data existed. It was just unusable. Transit's bet was that the missing piece was not more buses. It was a better screen.

Two Montrealers and a hunch about cars.

Sam Vermette and Guillaume Campagna released the first version of Transit in 2012, for the iPhone, with the Android version close behind. The premise was unfashionably ambitious for a maps app: reduce the need to own a car in cities. Not ban cars. Not lecture. Just make the alternative so easy to use that the car stops feeling mandatory.

The crowdsourcing trick

The clever move came when they realized they did not have to wait for agencies to install GPS on every vehicle. Riders already carry GPS units in their pockets. So Transit built GO: tap once when you board, and your phone quietly reports the vehicle's position to everyone else waiting down the line. In December 2017 the company announced real-time data for every New York City subway line, achieved not through new sensors but through riders' phones.

Then the strange investors arrived. In 2018, Transit raised a $17.5M Series B led by Alliance Ventures, the venture arm of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance, with Jaguar Land Rover's InMotion Ventures joining in. Carmakers, in other words, helped fund an app whose stated goal is getting people out of cars. Either they hedged their bets or they read the room. Total funding across rounds sits around $26M.

Fig. 1 - Twelve years compressed into seven lines, which is roughly how long the bus makes you wait anyway.

One tap, the whole commute.

Transit's core stays free: next departures, trip planning, mobile ticketing, and the multimodal stuff. The app does not just show you the bus. It shows you the bus, then the bike, then the car-share, then the on-demand shuttle, in the order that gets you home fastest.

Fig. 2 - Six features, zero of which require you to understand a printed timetable.

Agencies stopped fighting and started paying.

The skeptic's question is fair: why would a transit agency endorse an app it did not build? Because building a good one is hard, and Transit's is good. More than 40 agencies across Canada, the US, France, Ireland and New Zealand officially endorse it. That is the part that separates Transit from a clever side project.

Then came Royale, the subscription tier. Within a year of launch, around 70 transit agencies chose to sponsor it, buying group plans so every rider in their city gets the premium features free. An agency paying so its riders get a better experience of its own service is, when you think about it, the entire point of public transit working.

The partner list reads like a who's who of getting-around: Masabi, Token Transit and Bytemark for tickets; Via, RideCo, Spare Labs, Curb and Padam for microtransit; BCycle and PBSC for bikes; Communauto and Free2move for cars.

Make the car optional, not forbidden.

Transit has never asked anyone to feel guilty about driving. Its mission is quieter and, probably, more effective: reduce the need to own a car by making everything else easy. Guilt does not change behavior. Convenience does. The company bet that if the alternative to driving stopped being a research project, people would take it on the merits.

There is a climate story in here, the kind of carbon math that comes free when a full bus replaces forty cars. Transit tends not to shout about it. The pitch is to the individual rider standing at the corner, and it is about their morning, not the planet's. The planet benefits as a side effect, which is usually how the planet actually wins.

Back to the corner.

Return to that person at 8:14 a.m. A decade ago they would have been guessing, sighing, eyeing the cost of a car. Now they are watching a small colored line crawl toward a dot, and the dot is them, and they know exactly when to look up from their phone. The bus arrives. They get on. Nothing dramatic happens, which is the most dramatic possible outcome.

Cities are getting denser and the cars are not getting smaller. The agencies that run transit will keep being underfunded and overstretched, and they will keep needing someone to translate their tangle of routes into something a stranger can use in four minutes flat. That translation layer is the business Transit is in. As long as buses are late and people are impatient, there is work to do.

The bus was always coming. Transit just made it possible to believe that before it arrived.

See it move.

Fig. 3 - Links open searches and channels; the dot will be live, the bus may not.