OneBusAway for Pc

This app does sensible, useful things, and has a vastly better interface the other transit apps I've seen. It has a developer that apparently cares about making it better, which is practically unheard of. It even has good iPad functionality, and takes advantage of the larger format! I'm from San Diego; when I visited LA recently, I sorely missed this app. Trust me, the alternatives are all much worse. Sure, it's sometimes a little off on the timing estimates between stops. It doesn't handle layovers well, assuming the bus will leave early because it's present before the time it's scheduled to leave. And when a bus stops at the same stop when going in two different directions, I wish it would separate them out into different listings. But if you want to find, with reasonable accuracy, when a bus will be somewhere, and even filter by routes or bookmark frequently used stops, this is a solid and functional app, and if your local transit company makes use of it, believe me, it's way better than anything they would've come out with themselves. I use it often and am frequently pleased at how not-impossible it is to use, which is high praise for an app of this nature. I rarely encounter bugs, and updates actually bring useful improvements. It's a rare thing: a free app I'd actually be willing to pay for.

I used to love this app to death and it saved me a lot of time and stress when I first started tracking my buses with it. However, with this latest update, I’ve found that all the buses I’ve taken tend to be running multiple minutes earlier or later than what the app says. The algorithm has gotten altogether inaccurate over the last year or so. This wouldn’t be as frustrating to me, except that with the latest update the dev team removed the in-app reporting system for issues with bus arrival. I don’t know about you, but I neither want to write an email every time I ride a bus because it was ten or more minutes off OBA’s schedule, nor do I want to continue using an app that’s inaccurate where there’s nothing being done to fix it. Sad to say I’ll be moving to a different transit app.

This app is harder to use over the years with voiceover. The nearby stops is harder to find than it used to be. We can’t just hit a button as we used to. And furthermore we are cluttered with service alerts that don’t interest you when you’re not traveling in that city. As this system is mainly to give you the stops you need, there’s no reason to worry about the Seattle tunnel on the bus route 28 in Tacoma. And if I was looking for a trip in Seattle, it would make sense. But there’sIf there’s no tunnel in Tacoma. If I’m going to see that, I would like to have a preference to not see that. But the geo-fence a little farther around your service alert, so we can get those. Or at least let us know how to customize the app so we don’t get the Seattle alerts for Tacoma.

Often my bus line is not tracked accurately. In my living room it stated the bus was on time 10 minutes away When I got to the stop it said on time and 23 minutes away but showed up 3 minutes later. If a bus is truly 23 minutes away I would choose to walk the 15 minutes it takes me to wait for the second bus I need to take. When decisions are made based on inaccurate information it can be frustrating to watch a bus drive by you didn’t expect to be coming on time. However it’s the only app available and still better than nothing.